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Works by Magdalena Abakanowicz
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A descendant of Genghis Khan who watched Nazis shoot her mother's arm off.
Daddy Abakanowicz was Russian aristocracy that bolted to Poland after the Bolsheviks got trigger happy during the switchover from Empire to Socialist Republic. The family name ran back to the Mongol emperor of Persia Abaka-Khan, great-grandson of Genghis Kahn. Their royal ties run deep. He got hitched to Magdalena's Mama, of Polish nobility, and settled down on her family's estate a couple hundred miles east of Warsaw. Soon enough, Magdalena arrived and spent her time in the forests around their estate. Wishing for other kids to play with, since she had neither siblings nor neighbors in her tax bracket.
World War II started and the Abakanowicz clan hunkered down to try and ride the storm. Things got too real when drunk Nazis barreled across their lawn and started breaking down the door. Magdalena's Mama let them in to try and get the situation under control. Then, in front of Magdalena, the Nazis shot Mama's right arm clean off and shot up the other hand. The Nazis left, and the Abakanowicz family got the hell out of there to hide out in Warsaw.
After the war, the Soviets made it clear that anyone with a noble family history was gonna get got. The family fled north to the Baltic Coast and lived like they were in witness protection. Magdalena left for art school in Warsaw. Hiding her family history for years. Dealing with the dictates of acceptable art from Poland's communist regime. Extreme poverty. She even had to donate blood to make ends meet. Her track of study focused on textiles.
While her first job out of college was designing ties in a silk factory, it didn't last long. She hated the daily slog. After marrying well, she gained enough monetary autonomy to do art full time. As Abakanowicz puts it, "In Poland it was almost forbidden to talk about mystery...I did." Her first major project was gigantic suspended textiles she named after her family, Abakans. The project won her international praise in an era when it was difficult for the Polish to get permission to travel outside of the country. From there, she's gone on to grouped sculptures that have a noticeable tying bind: None of them have hands.
Since the Polish government has eased up on travel restrictions, it's a lot easier for Magdalena to travel around the world to collect the awards she's always receiving and oversee her installations. She may be pushing 90, but Magdalena still puts in work.
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Magdalena Abakanowicz
Magdalena Abakanowicz (
Polish pronunciation: [maɡdaˈlɛna abakaˈnɔvit͡ʂ]; 20 June 1930 – 20 April 2017) was a Polish sculptor and fiber artist. Known for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium and for outdoor installations, Abakanowicz has been considered among the most influential Polish artists of the postwar era. She worked as a professor of studio art at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland, from 1965 to 1990, and as a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles in 1984.
She was born to a noble landowning family in Falenty, near Warsaw, before the outbreak of World War II. Her formative years were marred by the Nazi occupation of Poland, during which her family became part of the Polish resistance. After the war, under the imposed communist rule, Abakanowicz attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Sopot and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw between 1950 and 1954, navigating a conservative educational environment marked by the imposition of Soviet-dictated restrictive and propagandistic doctrine of Socialist Realism.
The Polish October and subsequent political and cultural thaw in 1956 marked a significant turning point in Abakanowicz's career. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Abakanowicz's work began to take on more structure and geometric form, influenced in part by Constructivism. Her one-person exhibit at the Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw in 1960 signaled her emergence in the Polish textile and fiber design movement. She received first international recognition following her participation in the first Biennale Internationale de le Tapisserie in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1962.
Abakanowicz's most celebrated works emerged in the 1960s with her creation of three-dimensional fiber works called Abakans. During the 1970s and 1980s, she transitioned to creating humanoid sculptures. These works reflected the anonymity and confusion of the individual amidst the human mass, a theme influenced by her life under a Communist regime. Some of her prominent international public artworks include Agora in Chicago and Birds of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Milwaukee.
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