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Magdalena Abakanowicz: Seeing the World in Its Entirety
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17200 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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2 / 1990 |
2,090 Words |
| Author
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Lisa Hammel
Lisa Hamel is a writer on the arts living in New York and a
frequent contributor to the New York Times. |
It is the heads in glass cases one notices first. Four or five heads on stands, features blurred, boneless noses squashed flat, thin lips disappearing, blind eyes in sunken sockets. And yet there are some who look kind, expressive, as if their thoughts and feelings have pushed outward, leaving immutable tracks on their faces. They appear wise, mute, patient, helpless, heartbroken, bitter, resigned at whatever they have to watch.
These are the work of sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, some of the most recent productions in an enormous and varied oeuvre. The resin-stiffened cotton faces and other recent works were on display this autumn at the Marlborough Gallery on West 57th Street in New York. In other rooms were heads of animals, seated figures, bronze human heads, threatening instruments of war, and enormous mastodon-like creatures: a universe creating its own heroes, victims, gods, and demons - its own zoology and mythology.
Although Abakanowicz has been exhibiting for almost three decades around the world, from Japan and Australia to Europe and North and South America, and has work in the collections of fifty museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this was only her second New York gallery show, the first being at the Xavier Fourcade Gallery in 1985. The Polish sculptor, who had come a week earlier to install the exhibition - as she insists on doing with each of her shows - said that she had worked intensively for three years on these works, none of which have been seen publicly before.
The largest group in the show, Crowd III, comprising fifty standing figures, was assembled in the first room
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