Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1930‒2017

It is with great sadness that I learned of the death of Magdalena Abakanowicz on April 20, 2017.

A body breathes, smells, tastes, hears, touches, and is touched. As we handle work with fiber we discover a language, we become our own storytellers. The pleasures of Abakanowicz’s work have been rich and ambiguous, contradictory and painful for me. She helped me find the unguarded spaces of desire and I shall miss her.

As noted in the excellent New York Times of April 21, 2017:

Abakanowicz’s art emerged from difficult circumstances. She was born Marta Abakanowicz on a country estate in Falenty, southwest of Warsaw, on June 20, 1930. Her mother, belonged to a noble landowning family, and Marta grew up on an estate about 125 miles east of Warsaw left by her grandparents.

The trauma of the World War II was that war was not spoken about specifically and neither was her family background in the studio she ran at Poznań Academy of Art. I was a British Council scholar there in 1976, arriving during the Cold War across Europe. Abakanowicz did express, however, how difficult it was to articulate the powerful memories of childhood, of forests, strange spirits, a remembrance of things past that would haunt an increasingly technological world.

She further acknowledged Maria Laszkiewicz who had witnessed the fiber-art works that had been exhibited at the Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw in 1960. Laszkiewicz allowed her to make use of her basement workshop and looms, and significantly added her name to a list of artists to be included in the first Biennial of Tapestries in Lausanne in 1962. For this Biennial, Abakanowicz submitted “Composition of White Forms,” in which she used old clotheslines to create a rough abstract surface. She transformed weaving, a rather “humble” practice, into contemporary sculpture.

For subsequent Lausanne Biennials she produced a series of fibrous, fleshy forms known as Abakans, for which she is globally known throughout the fiber and textile community. Although Abakanowicz would deny a formal alliance with both and with being identified as a female artist, she nonetheless inspired many of us to think about how we could combine painting and sculpture with the simplest of means in sisal but which held architectural and conceptual challenges. For me, this included feminism since the work transgressed conventional and hierarchical boundaries. Irrational, anarchistic, petrified, and visceral, her early forms spoke of a gendered sensibility.

During the 1970s, through a cycle of work known as Alterations, she created groups of figures made of burlap that were often hollowed and bent. The stretched stitches and gnarled strands burst their wrappings in the Heads series of 1973–1975. This was followed by Seated Figures (1974–1979) and “Backs” (1976–1982), some of which I saw at her exhibition in 1975 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, where organic materials of everyday use were woven and stitched to produce human coverings and bent bodies—hessian bones, and giant cast burlap gouges, which resembled giant bandaged heads, broken limbs, organs slashed or gouged, sometimes reduced to non-beings, “hollow men,” headless figures perched on metal armatures or gaged wooden structures. They seemed so fragile, temporary and yet were so powerfully solid. Each work spoke to mortality.

When the biology of the body breaks down, the skin has to be cut so as to give access to the inside, later it has to be sewn like fabric. The inside has the same importance as the outer shell. (Abakanowicz 1983, 74)

Giant cloaks, monumental garments, were hung between ceiling and floor. Huge openings, wrapped protrusions and thick folded areas of sisal appeared as vaginal forms.

The Alterations series climaxed in Embryology (1978–1980), which is now in the collection of the TATE and fortunately fills its own room under the heading of Materials and Objects. Embryology is a collection of objects of varying sizes, made of various rough-hewn fabrics and stuffed. The boulder-like forms are accumulated into large group environments that you can walk into and around. While they appear firm and weighty, the seams and slashes in the fabric betray their softness (Figure 1).

Made in 1969, Abakan Red is also held within the collection at the TATE. It is suspended from the ceiling and falls into folds. Abakan Orange 1971 is also in the TATE and consists of a long orange rope-like form hanging from the ceiling, gradually diminishing in width to a thin thread connected to a large, roughly circular shape draped on the floor. I was fortunate to be able to hang both these seminal works at the first Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, “Fiber Visions” in September 2013.

Gerhardt Knodel, the former president of Cranbrook Academy in the US sent me an email on April 26, 2017. He speaks for so many who remember how the work of Abakanowicz changed their lives.

So it is with a flood of memories that accompanied news of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s passing on Thursday of this week. Suddenly with the news, I was once again 32 years old and remembering meeting Magda at her age of 40. I had never heard anyone speak as she spoke, or who made work with the degree of personal commitment generated from the most challenging life experiences. She inspired me to anticipate the age of 40!! She seemed as a beacon focused on future potential generated by complete commitment to life lived in pursuit of art. What generous inspiration!

Janis Jefferies
Professor of Visual Arts
Goldsmiths College
University of London

[email protected]

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janis Jefferies

Readers of the Journal will be interested to learn that Janis Jefferies is editing a special issue on the work and pedagogy of Abakanowicz. So far, the issue contains revised essays by Mary Jane Jacob, the executor of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s estate, an associate of Marlborough Galleries, New York and Head of Exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but also a long-time collaborator, and Jasia Reichardt, former director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery who organized the 1975 exhibition. There are newly commissioned pieces from Michał Jachuła, curator of the Splendour of Polish Textiles, Zachęta, National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Marta Kowalewska, Head of Textiles at the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, Poland, and Agnieszka Golda, University of Wollongong, Australia. There will interviews and conversations between Marjan Boot and Leisbeth Crommelin, emeritus curators, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, former international students from Poznań Academy of Art in the 1970s, Patricia Leighton (Scotland/USA), Michelle Heon (Quebec/France), and Anna Goebel (Poland).

Quotes and citations will be from Michel Beck of Beck and Eggling, International Fine Art, Düsseldorf/Vienna, responsible for Abakanowicz’s retrospective in Venice 2015 Crowd and Individual in Venice and the catalogue that was produced to accompany the exhibition.

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