MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ

From the series "Incarnations".

We thank Ms. Jola Gola for the scientific support. This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of sculptures. Additionally this work is registered by the artist's achive under the number: 7L_8, 9, 10.

Provenance: Private collection Switzerland.

Exhibition: Zurich 1988, Magdalena Abakanowicz. Inkarnationen. Turske & Turske, 9 August - 17 September1988, p. 26-27.

Literature: Shimun, Asahi: Magdalena Abakanowicz. Sezon Museum of Art Tokyo 1991, p. 131.

Born in 1930, the sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz came from a Polish noble family. The Second World War and the subsequent Soviet regime brought great hardship and suffering for the family. Abakanowicz studied painting from 1949 to 1954 at the art academy in Danzig, but soon developed a great fascination for sculpture. Abakanowicz turned the difficult economic circumstances behind the Iron Curtain turned to her advantage: she turned to sculpture and used found materials in order to create her sometimes monumental sculptures.
Having shifted to textile art and large weaving projects, which she called Abakans, she succeeded in breaking through at international level in the 1960s. At the beginning of the 1970s she began to form animals, figures and heads out of sisal, linen and sacking. In the 1980s she then discovered bronze. She produced monumental outdoor sculptures, but also the series “Incarantions”, from which the present work comes. Alongside her numerous exhibitions, the countless distinctions are proof of the international recognition which Abakanowicz has received: she received honorary doctorates from the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston and the Academy of Fine Arts, Poznán, amongst others. She is the bearer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic as well as the Knight Commander’s Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. The artist passed away in April 2017 in Warsaw.

“Incarnations – is the title of the cycle of unique cast bronze faces of people and animals. (…) The faces capture a fleeing moment, vibrations of form, the appearance and disappearance of shape. They are narratives of that which is fleeting within time and material substance. The faces arose from an impression of my face in a soft material. Warm, runny wax washed over my facial features and created new ones. Suddenly setting, it holds them firm. (…) The faces of ‘Incarnations’ reveal fragments of a hidden chaos behind the living face. Each of these rigid, metal faces is a possible or a true fragment of my reality.”. (quote from: Abakanowicz, in: Exh. Cat. Inkarnationen. Magdalena Abakanowicz, Turske und Turske, Zurich 1988, p. 5)