Magdalena Abakanowicz

Featured in the exhibition is Standing Figures (15), an installation of multiple, life-sized, headless and armless standing figures cast in bronze, forms that are among her best-known and most powerful works. Also on view is Coexistence, a group of seven, life-sized figure-shells with imaginary animal-like heads molded in burlap and coated in resin. This signature technique was recognized early on as a challenge to common perceptions of fiber sculpture, and is readily identified with the artist’s work. The political undercurrent and psychologically charged presence of these crowds that serve as potent metaphors for the human condition are drawn from the artist’s personal experiences in war-torn Poland. Each figure is unique among the group with its individually wrinkled, skin-like surface, unrepeatable beings in a mass of similar forms.

Magdalena Abakanowicz was born in 1930 to an aristocratic family in Falenty, Poland and lives and works in Warsaw. Early in her life, she was witness to the horrors of war and political unrest that affected her native country, the Nazi invasion in 1939, and the forty years of communist rule. She chose to remain in Poland throughout her life despite these hardships, and her autobiographical struggle is deeply rooted within the art she creates. She has remarked, “My whole life has been formed and deformed by wars and revolutions of various kinds, mass hatred and mass worship.”

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Magdalena Abakanowicz