It is the first major presentation of Abakanowicz’s oeuvre, organized eight years after the artist’s death and more than six decades after her debut.
The director of the Bourdelle Museum, Ophelie Ferlier-Bouat, told Polish Radio: "It’s a great event for us. At long last we are doing justice to Abakanowicz”. She added: “Initially, her links with France were very regular and lively. It was only in later years that she fell into an almost total oblivion in this country.”
Titled The Thread of Existence, the exhibition features about 80 works – sculptural installations, textiles, drawings, and photographs. They were loaned from the Marta Magdalena Abakanowicz Kosmowska and Jan Kosmowski Foundation in Warsaw, Polish museums, as well as the Toms Pauli Foundation in Lausanne, the Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
Magdalena Abakanowicz. Photo: PAP/Grzegorz Momot
In the artist’s profile, the Bourdelle Museum describes Abakanowicz as “a pioneer in contemporary sculpture and textile art […] who experienced war, censorship, and deprivation imposed by the communist regime from an early age.”
The museum website adds: “She produced immersive, poetic, sometimes disturbing and often political sculptures and textile works. Inspired by the organic world, by seriality and monumentality, her work possesses an undeniable power and presence, resonating with contemporary issues—environmental, humanistic, and feminist ones.”
Born in 1930, 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 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The artist died in 2017 at the age of 86.
The exhibition at the Bourdelle Museum runs until April 12.
(mk)