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ArtTop10.com Founder Robert Dunt reviews the art exhibition Magdalena Abaknaowicz: Every Tangle of Thead and Rope at Tate Modern London. Described by Robert Dunt as a Polish Barbara Hepworth this show is a fascinating glimpse of an artist who was driven by the spiritual and the spirits that lived in the forest by her parents’ house. The resulting works are huge fascinating textile pieces that float in the gallery in a mesmerising and sometimes alarming fashion.

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The Tate Press Release says –

“The Abakans were a kind of bridge between me and the outside world. I could surround myself with them; I could create an atmosphere in which I somehow felt safe because they were my world.” – Magdalena Abakanowicz
Tate Modern offers a rare opportunity to explore an extraordinary body of work by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz known as Abakans. Made of organic materials such as horsehair, sisal and hemp rope, these complex three-dimensional forms broke new ground for art in the 1960s and 70s. Bringing together 26 of these radical works for the first time in the UK, the exhibition presents a forest of towering sculptures, enabling visitors to explore their ambiguous forms and earthy scents.
With a career spanning over 50 years, Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017) changed what it meant to be a sculptor and led the way for other artists working with fibre. Having grown up among the rural landscapes outside Warsaw, Poland, she took inspiration from the myth, folklore and spirits of the forest – themes that would eventually lead the artist to create new worlds through her work. Although she came of age during the traumatic events of World War II and later lived under the restrictions of an oppressive Communist regime, Abakanowicz was determined to engage on a global scale. Gaining international recognition by 1970 for her revolutionary installations, she went on to cross the Iron Curtain more than any other artist, participating in hundreds of exhibitions worldwide.
Choosing to reject the restrictive definitions of art and craft inherited from previous generations, Abakanowicz created trailblazing fibre installations that were a radical departure from the traditional tapestries produced in Western Europe. Deriving their name from the artist’s own family name, Abakans astounded critics when they were first presented in the late 1960s.
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NOTES TO EDITORS
ABOUT MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ
Magdalena Abakanowicz was born in Falenty, Poland in 1930 and graduated from the Academy of Fine Art, Warsaw in 1954, having studied painting and weaving. In 1962 she gained recognition outside Poland at the 1st International Tapestry Biennial in Lausanne. In 1965 she won the Gold Medal in Applied Arts at the São Paulo Biennial. This prestige brought her an appointment as professor, heading the weaving studio at the Poznań art academy until 1990 (in 2020 it was renamed the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts).
While her invention of weaving methods alongside known techniques led to critics to call her rectangular wall works Abakans as early as 1964, this uniquely personal term became identified with her more radical, fully three-dimensional forms beginning in 1967. The 1970s saw an expansion into environmental installations with shows in Europe, the US, and Australia, culminating with her in command of the Polish Pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale where Embryology – 800 soft sculptures which feature in the Tate collection as well as this exhibition – were first exposed. There, too, were her iconic Backs (40 are in the Tate collection) which, along with Heads and Seated Figures, comprised her Alterations series begun in 1973 in which she employed burlap sacking. This led to her formidable Crowds of headless figures, always striving to show individuality in spite of multiplicity, leading her in later decades to create herds of mutant mammals and flocks of bomber-like birds.

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