A major retrospective of works by the late Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz opens Saturday at the Polish Sculpture Centre at Orońsko, 120 kilometres south of Warsaw. On display is a cross-section of Abakanowicz’s creative activity which spanned six decades. The artist died in 2017, at the age of 87.
Exhibition curator Eulalia Domanowska has told the Polish Press Agency: “Our goal is to show Abakanowicz as a total artist, who gained reputation in the mid-1960s for her textiles and ‘abakans’ [towering textile structures suspended from the gallery ceiling] but at the start of the 1970s took up sculpture, first using jute and metal, and later creating spatial installations across the world.”
The exhibition features works from Abakanowicz’s best-known cycles, such as Standing Figures, Backs, Mutants, The Plowman, War Games and Katharsis.
It runs until October 6.
Magdalena Abakanowicz belonged to Poland’s most renowned visual artists. She had over 100 individual exhibitions and her works are in the collections of 120 museums and private galleries, including Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. She won the Gold Medal at the São Paulo Art Biennale in 1965.
The collection of the Polish Sculpture Centre at Orońsko contains over 2, 000 works by leading Polish 20th-century artists. (mk/