Abakanowicz at Wawel: When Contemporary Textiles Meet Royal Tapestries

abakanowicz_w_komnatach.jpg, default, View from the exhibition Abakanowicz. No Rules. Tapestries and Abakans at the Wawel Castle, Wawel Royal Castle, 2025, photo: Jeremi Dobrzański, Wawel

#photography & visual arts

In an encyclopaedia of the history of textiles in Poland, abakans and arrases would be at the top of the list – not only because of their alphabetical position but also due to their significance. An exhibition juxtaposing the tapestries collected by Sigismund Augustus in his royal residence with Magdalena Abakanowicz’s spatial fabric sculptures, which revolutionised the entire discipline, is such a sure-fire hit that it is surprising no one has organised it before.

To understand why such an event did not happen at Wawel earlier, we need to look back a few decades and, on the way to the Senators’ Hall, stop at another exhibition. Curated by Lidia Brzyjska, the exhibition How about Something Different? Contemporary Art at the Wawel Castle traces the long history of introducing contemporary art into the noble interiors of the royal residence. The history is indeed lengthy; however, it has resulted in a rather modest collection. For decades, Wawel has sought the right way to breathe new life into the castle chambers and instil a spirit of modernity.

The history of this subtle modernisation of the royal residence can be divided into three chapters. In the first, innovative accents served a practical purpose, quite literally, in the form of design, namely, furniture and spatial arrangements created by contemporary artists. Those made for the Wawel interiors by Marian Sigmund and Adam Młodzianowski in the 1960s, which still remain in many palace rooms today, continue to serve their purpose and are among the best, albeit little-known, examples of communist-era design. Unlike mass-produced icons of modern design, they are not available on online groups or portals; they are bespoke designs for specific locations at Wawel Castle.

Works of art – paintings and prints – also initially served a practical, functional purpose, being, in fact, a promotional tool. Displayed at exhibitions organised in cooperation with the Association of Polish Artists and Designers (ZPAP), such as Wawel w Grafice Współczesnej (Wawel in Contemporary Prints), they essentially functioned as premium postcards. They depicted the distinctive outline of Wawel Hill, the arcaded courtyard, and historical objects from the castle’s collections, including the colourful woodcut Zbrojownia Wawelska (Wawel Armoury) from 1974 by Krystyna Wróblewska, Andrzej Wróblewski’s mother.

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View from the exhibition Abakanowicz. No Rules. Tapestries and Abakans at the Wawel Castle, Wawel Royal Castle, 2025, photo: Adam Golec, Wawel Royal Castle

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A few years later, the approach to collecting contemporary art changed completely. Among the paintings collected in the 1980s, we do not find a view of Wawel Hill, the gleaming dome of Sigismund’s Chapel, or even a small architectural detail from the royal castle. The only local link is that the Wawel collection then expanded to include works by artists most often associated with Kraków, specifically the Second Kraków Group: Jerzy Nowosielski, Erna Rosenstein, and Maria Jarema. These were acquired with the intention of an off-site exhibition – a gallery in a branch of the State Art Collection housed in another castle, in Sucha Beskidzka. The plans were abandoned, leaving Wawel with a modest, orphaned collection for years to come.

This brings us to the contemporary chapter, which was inaugurated by Edward Dwurnik in 2010. An exhibition of the painter’s works was held at Wawel during that time, and he donated the painting Kraków – Wawel to the collection. In subsequent years, the Wawel collection was cautiously expanded through acquisitions of contemporary works. These are purchased infrequently and are much more closely aligned with the main theme of the castle’s exhibition policy. At the same time, they go beyond the illustrative nature typical of works from half a century ago; rather than producing many paintings and prints on the same theme, individual artists engage more deeply with the Wawel context.

Kinga Nowak created an abstract installation made of coloured glass panes, referencing Wyspiański and his ambition to remodel Wawel Hill. Łukasz Stokłosa produced an atmospheric, melancholic variation on the theme of historical painting that does not require characters or any ‘action’ to narrate the story of the former monarchy, but solely interiors and objects. Marcin Maciejowski visited the castle chambers, exhibitions, and offices, and also drew on his own memories, integrating them all into the art book Rysunki Wawelskie (Wawel Drawings).

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View from the exhibition Abakanowicz. No Rules. Tapestries and Abakans at the Wawel Castle, Wawel Royal Castle, 2025, photo: Jeremi Dobrzański, Wawel Royal Castle

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In this context, Magdalena Abakanowicz finally arrives at Wawel. While the earlier exhibition Abakanowicz. No Rules – a summer display of her sculptures in the Royal Gardens – offered a more picturesque, seasonal intervention, the encounter between her abakans and the royal arrases marks a far more ambitious undertaking.

Do the abakans and tapestries from the royal collection share anything in common besides both being classified broadly as ‘fabric’? Half a millennium separates them, but it is precisely this distance that allows us to understand what a great revolution the abakans and other works by artists from the Polish school of fabric represented in their time. At the dawn of the 1960s, the way fabrics were crafted resembled more the technique of weaving tapestries for the Polish king in Renaissance Brussels workshops than Abakanowicz’s artistic philosophy. The artist would create a cardboard sketch of the design at the correct scale, and a team of weavers would reproduce it as faithfully as possible on their looms.

‘Abakanowicz. No Rules. Tapestries and Abakans at the Wawel Castle’ [Image Gallery]

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Over the centuries, forms have changed, of course, just as the tapestries designed by Michiel Coxcie drew on the experiences of the mature Italian Renaissance, so the modern fabrics displayed at the Lausanne Biennale owed much to modernist painting in terms of form. However, the division of labour remained unchanged. Compared with the remarkable textile works created in this traditional manner during the golden age, Abakanowicz’s works demonstrate her boldness, as she approached the fabric in a completely different way—detaching it from the wall, shaping it with her own hands, and bringing out the expressiveness of the fabric itself. At this level, Abakanowicz’s works – using, among other materials, raw sisal ropes, fleece, and horsehair tied to a linen warp – seem to boldly challenge elegant tapestries woven from wool and silk, interwoven with silver and gold threads.

Smaller tapestries decorating the royal residence were circulated and used as a festive backdrop for court ceremonies. Still, the longest journey of the royal arrases occurred under dramatic circumstances, long after Sigismund Augustus’s death. Evacuated from Wawel following the German invasion, they were secretly transported during the early days of the war, avoiding Nazi troops and fighter planes crossing the sky. They were floated down the Vistula River on an inconspicuous coal barge, then loaded onto peasant carts, and finally transported by bus and car to Romania, from where they continued their voyage to Canada via the ports of Marseille and London.

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View from the exhibition Abakanowicz. No Rules. Tapestries and Abakans at the Wawel Castle, Wawel Royal Castle, 2025, photo: Jeremi Dobrzański, Wawel Royal Castle

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Like most modern fabrics, abakans were not created with a specific interior in mind. However, nomadism is even more deeply ingrained in Abakanowicz’s works. The artist’s father, who came from a Tatar family, instilled in her an interest in the history of this branch of her family, whose roots, according to Konstanty Abakanowicz’s accounts, date back to the 13th-century Mongolian ruler Abaqa Khan. For the artist, this genealogy developed into a unique biographical myth. Although long overlooked by researchers of her work, the theme of her Tatar origins – as Dorota Jagoda Michalska recently demonstrated – was subtly woven into her artworks. Detached from the flat wall, Abakanowicz’s expansive, spatial fabrics became not only a form of soft sculpture but also an afterimage of yurts, set up by nomadic peoples at various stops during their wanderings across the Eurasian steppes.

The spatial arrangement of the fabric can be seen as evidence of the artist’s exploration of her Tatar roots, for which the collection of tapestries belonging to the 16th-century ruler creates an unobvious context. After all, the Tatars, who gradually settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Crown from the 15th century onwards, enjoyed special freedoms during the reign of the first Jagiellonian kings. It was none other than Sigismund Augustus who, through two privileges issued in 1561 and 1568, granted them rights that, in many respects, equated the Tatar hospodars with the Polish nobility. In this context, Abakanowicz’s quasi-yurts remind us of the foundations of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s power during its golden age, which manifested itself, among other things, through the dazzling art collections at the royal court – a power built on multiculturalism and tolerance.

Filtered through the romantic imagination of the 19th century, the image of Sigismund Augustus portrays the ruler mainly as a bon vivant who, to the scandal of the whole country, engages in a secret affair with Barbara Radziwiłł, who, centuries after her death, was compared to Helen of Troy. However, the king appears equally intriguing when we look into his walk-in wardrobe rather than his bedchamber.

Presenting abakans well today is no easy task. Throughout their history, the spatial quality of the Polish artist’s fabrics has been best brought out not by a major museum retrospective, but by the short film Abakany (1970), directed by Jarosław Brzozowski (completed after his death by Kazimierz Mucha), with music composed by Bogusław Schaeffer. It features a memorable image of fabrics carried almost like in a religious procession to the dunes of the Słowiński National Park, where they are placed in the open air, gently moving in the wind and, as Michalska pointed out, revealing their nomadic connotations with the desert-steppe landscapes that have filled the artist’s imagination since childhood.

In museum interiors, Abakanowicz’s works become motionless, almost petrified. If we wanted to touch them, slip between the folds of the material, and hide within them for a moment – in accordance with the artist’s intention – we would probably make the guards’ hearts race, and we would leave the exhibition escorted by security. Yet even though we can only admire them from a distance, the abakans in the unusual spaces of the royal residence seem to come to life almost as they would in a sandy seaside landscape, revealing their full richness of meaning. And although we can only touch the prepared samples of materials (both abakans and arrases, which is worth appreciating), observing the subtle threads of understanding between fabrics separated by hundreds of years of history proves equally satisfying.

Translated from Polish by Agnieszka Mistur

^{Abakanowicz. No Rules. Tapestries and Abakans at the Wawel Castle}
^{17 October 2025 – 6 January 2026}
^{Curatorial team: Bogumiła Wiśniewska, Natalia Koziara-Ochęduszko, Andrzej Szczepaniak}
^{Wawel Royal Castle}

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