The Unbearable Weight of the Abakans

5_magdalena_abakanowicz.jpg, default, ‘Three-part Black Abakan / A Dark Spatial Composition’, 1972, from the collection of the Central Textile Museum in Łódź, photo: Central Textile Museum

#photography & visual arts

Magdalena Abakanowicz never suffered from lack of popularity or lack of media attention. However, the reception of her works wasn’t always reverent, and the pieces that sometimes garnered the most admiration were often the ones the artist herself would’ve rather forgotten about.

Magdalena Abakanowicz was never a ‘forgotten’ artist who could be ‘discovered and reclaimed’ for art history years later. Throughout her whole career she was often present in the press, she gave countless interviews, posed for many photographs accompanying articles, essays, mentions, and opinion pieces published in various periodicals, from daily newspapers to cultural magazines.

It’s on the pages of press publications that a term was born that would, from then on, be permanently tied to her artistic output. In 1964, Elwira Żmudzka, a journalist at Zwierciadło magazine, coined the word ‘abakan’, when describing the artist’s textile creations, difficult to classify and ‘so new there’s no name for them as of yet’. A photograph of the artist by her looms was captioned:

Text

How to refer to Magdalena Abakanowicz’s woven images? Perhaps ABAKANS? Sounds pretty good – a little traditional, and it puts emphasis on the talented creator’s authorship. We’re by no means joking when we propose the name.

The name quickly gained traction. Soon after, the press was flooded with titles and articles featuring ‘abakans’. The name remained – and together with it, a simplification was devised that helped critics increasingly discuss Abakanowicz’s textiles as sculptures.

Taking a closer look at how the press wrote about Abakanowicz resembles looking through a kaleidoscope – shifting, more or less consistent assemblages of associations, definitions and interpretations, further complicated by the narrative the artist fashioned about herself. What did the public read about in Express Wieczorny (The Evening Express), student weeklies, daily newspapers and cultural periodicals in the 1960s and early 1970s, at the time when the artist was making her astonishing abakans? And, for comparison’s sake, what did they read about later, when the artist was increasingly turning to more and more figurative sculptures?

Naming troubles

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

‘Queen, Orange with Black’, 1970 / 1980, from the Starmach Gallery collection, Kraków, photo: Marek Gardulski

Picture image

1_magdalena_abakanowicz.jpg

At the beginning, the same problem recurred again and again in the reception of Abakanowicz’s works, namely: what to actually call them? Critics would jostle to coin terms that would allow them to locate her works beyond the limits of traditional weaving. They wrote of ‘anti-textiles’, ‘sculptures in textile’ or ‘woven paintings’. Adjectives were piled high, writers tried to frame her works as objects from the category of ‘great art’ – as paintings, then as sculptures – but abakans, although they sometimes borrowed expressions from the language of sculpture and painting, nevertheless remained textiles. Unique, innovative through and through, but still textiles. So little and yet so much.

The artist herself wanted, above all, to avoid the label of a ‘weaver’ – more and more as time passed. Asked about definitions, she avoided giving straightforward answers, thus creating space for interpretation – and for discussion that would continue throughout the years that followed. The abakans were too monumental, too fleshy, too spatial to remain within the category of textile art, but at the same too organic to unambiguously fit into the category of sculpture. Throughout the entire discussion, textile art was often denied the right to independence, as if it could exist only through reference to other art forms. Abakanowicz was one of the first artists to reverse this hierarchy. However, the problem was eventually solved through the effort of the artist herself, who, in the mid-1970s, turned towards works that could without a shadow of a doubt be received and described as sculptures.

In the case of Abakanowicz, the need to define – to ascribe to a category, to place firmly in a pigeonhole of ‘great art’ – was a point of departure for the majority of critical and journalistic assessments. That problem revealed a broader phenomenon: the uncertain position of textiles in the world of art. Works that play with colour but aren’t paintings, or spatial works that aren’t sculptures, would fall into a grey zone in terms of reception. The lexicon used by critics at the time wasn’t keeping pace with contemporary art.

These dilemmas were inspired by Abakanowicz’s debut at the International Tapestry Biennial in Lausanne in 1962, where Composition of White Forms – a piece that, while still flat, bordered on relief territory – heralded a revolution. Three years later, her individual exhibition was held at the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. In a review written for Kultura magazine, Hanna Ptaszkowska would ask rhetorically: ‘Tapestry? Painting? Or perhaps works of any affiliation, made with textiles?’. The critic pointed to a ‘marriage with contemporary painting’ as well as the painterly pedigree of Abakanowicz’s thinking on colour and composition as the driving force of the artist’s revolution.

At the beginning of her artistic journey, Abakanowicz was mostly known as a ‘painter-weaver’, at least as far as critical reception was concerned. However, she would eventually liberate tapestry from its ‘firm dependence on painting’. The further and more boldly the artist would spatialise her works, the more she became a ‘sculptor-weaver’.

Strange shapes

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

‘Yellow Abakan’, 1970, from the collection of the National Museum in Poznań, photo: National Museum in Poznań

Picture image

3_magdalena_abakanowicz.jpg

Abakans would fascinate, surprise, and evoke associations that people would be eager to share. In Abakanowicz’s ‘monstrously huge’ pieces they would try to recognise familiar shapes, seeing ‘clams’, ‘huge bats’, ‘tentacles and shoulders’ or ‘prehistoric creatures’. A Twórczość journalist offered a poetic description of his encounters with abakans: ‘the impression that one is facing some gigantic living forms, resembling a herd of bison or buffalos, intermingles with the opposite one: that they are balloons, half-kites, still trapped close to the ground […], but already floating in the air’. Juliusz Garztecki wrote about Abakanowicz’s knots as ‘branches or roots growing out of, and then growing back into, the ground’, seeing them as: ‘a strange, non-existent tree’, ‘a salmon pink coat worn under the armour of a fairy-tale giant’, forms ‘familiar or intuited to be possible’.

The search for familiar and recognisable forms in the abstract artworks wasn’t surprising. What dominated, with regard to abakans, were organic, animal, and vegetal associations but also bodily and anthropomorphising ones. Abakanowicz’s work was about to take a turn marking a progressive break with the form that brought her fame. The world of her art was soon to be populated by figures, more or less literal, reproduced and made with burlap bags.

One of the first people to describe this new direction was Andrzej Osęka, who in 1974, on the pages of the Polska magazine, published a short article titled ‘Tkaniny, ale Inne’ (Textiles, but Different). The piece was accompanied by a huge photo of the abakan Układ Przestrzenny (Spatial Composition) as well as reproductions of works from the series Heads (made between 1973 and 1975, then titled Deviations). Osęka emphatically pointed out that Abakanowicz ‘made sculptures out of tapestry’. Then, referring to the well-liked point about the rejection of tradition, he writes: ‘that, then, would put an end to tapestry of the past, where delicate, glossy texture of the fabric would tell the stories of saints and laymen, martyrdoms, tournaments, love, death. That would be the end of fiction in art. And yet not so. The latest works by Magdalena Abakanowicz return to the function of representation […]. This is only the beginning of the new world emerging within this art form’.

Osęka saw in this ‘new world’ clear longing for the literal and the concrete. This transition – from the abakans, focused on form and metaphor, back to ‘grand narratives’ – marked the beginning of the critics’ attempts to capture and interpret the artist’s latest ‘experiments’.

A textile figure

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

‘Crowd III’ by Magdalena Abakanowicz at an exhibition at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, 1995, photo: Andrzej Lange / Polish Press Agency

Picture image

tlum_iii_magdaleny_abakanowicz_pap.jpg

Ten years after the previous one, another individual exhibition by Abakanowicz – one that signalled her break with abstraction – was held at the Zachęta. Besides some final abakans, it comprised the series Heads and Seated Figures, which the artist grouped together in the cycle Alterations. The Trybuna Ludu newspaper recognised this breakthrough moment: they referred to abakans as ‘spaces of plastic metaphor’, adding: ‘these compositions are only one step removed from sculpture. And the artist did take that step, creating series of extraordinarily expressive torsos and heads’. That ‘step’ could hardly remain unnoticed.

Andrzej Sawicki pointed to the dramatic change of scale: ‘when juxtaposed with this sprawling, all-encompassing matter, human figures appear dwarf-like, like Gulliver in the Land of Giants’.

In the exhibition catalogue, Andrzej Osęka poetically juxtaposed the ‘forest of abakans’, full of wonders and kind spirits, with the new figures: ‘latest works by Magdalena Abakanowicz are d i f f e r e n t. As if they shed all magnificence, the beautiful and soft costume’. He describes ‘heads made of that which is usually the concealed inside: tow, cords […]: heads like bursting mattresses’. Similarly, the human figure is ‘made of similar stuff, like a human being flayed alive’; but Osęka doesn’t read it as a catastrophic vision but rather ‘a confession, a revealing of human tragedy’. And it’s the reflection about ‘human tragedy’ that became the dominant interpretive strategy for Alterations.

Since then, Alterations became, next to abakans, a fixed part of Abakanowicz’s exhibitions. Consequently, the press faced the challenge to capture the sudden change in the language of her works – after all, Abakanowicz had got everyone used to flaps of ‘tapestry detached from a wall’, to forests, bats, wings, sails, ‘soft’ and spatial sculptures, and elusive compositions.

Several recurring leitmotifs became prominent in the interpretations of Alterations: the homogenisation of humankind, the motif of vanitas, and – what’s crucial – the motif of war. The multitude of interpretations of the series, sometimes mutually exclusive and yet cited in conjunction, didn’t pose a problem. The artist herself helped maintain this state of things: she never denied any of the interpretations and didn’t feel the need to ‘reduce’ her works to ‘unambiguity’.

An important critical piece in the context of the figurative breakthrough in the work of Abakanowicz – one that stands out from the other critical voices, which praised Alterations almost in unison – was Marceli Bacciarelli’s 1979 article. The Bydgoszcz-based critic viewed abakans as the language of full-fledged sculpture and the avant-garde. He didn’t understand the turn towards Alterations, which he understood merely to be the artist’s inexplicable departure from her revolutionary technique. Bacciarelli referred to the expressionism of Alterations as ‘insufferable’, charging the works with a quality of naturalism, which for him belonged to the world of the past, constituting a compromised convention ‘which probably cannot be used to say anything meaningful anymore’.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

‘Anonymous Portraits’, 1988 / 2008, from the collection of the Marta Magdalena Abakanowicz-Kosmowska and Jan Kosmowski Foundation in Warsaw, photo: Marta Magdalena Abakanowicz-Kosmowska and Jan Kosmowski Foundation

Picture image

12_magdalena_abakanowicz.jpg

The critic also addressed the frequent comparisons to the works of Alina Szapocznikow. However, he viewed the significance that the body held for each artists as radically different: ‘for Szapocznikow, the problem of the body was a real-life one, whereas Abakanowicz, I suspect, makes her “casts” by way of response to the very important question in the life of every artist: what’s next, what path to follow…’. He concludes with a bitter reflection that the artist unnecessarily ‘plays at demonstrating that she’s capable of “moulding” a human figure out of fabric’.

Bacciarelli’s commentary points out the derivative interpretive elements in the reception of Abakanowicz’s works, which began right after the first showcases of Alterations and have kept recurring pretty much until today. Similar critique was scarce and didn’t resound prominently until the late 20^th and 21^st century. In the 1970s and 1980s, the treatment of Alterations was rather careful. Critics noted the shocking quality of their form and they compared these works with abakans. At the same time, a myriad of voices praised the new series and deemed them profoundly meaningful. Few would openly criticise one of Poland’s most renown artists.

The article by Bacciarelli didn’t sit well with some of his colleagues. For instance, Grażyna Banaszkiewicz suggested that his ‘sniffing at’ Alterations could have been prompted by nothing else than the shock that he suffered while viewing these works, resulting from his unpreparedness for such artistic experiences.

Export art

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

‘Agora’ by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Grand Park, Chicago, 2017, photo: Raymond Boyd / Getty Images

Picture image

abakanowicz_gettyimages-698728298.jpg

By the 1980s, Abakanowicz had become a celebrity in the world of culture, an artist ‘of worldwide renown’ – indeed, every mention of her stressed the international dimension of her career. The words ‘success’ and ‘fame’ were used repeatedly. Enumerating her prestigious exhibitions abroad, journalists would also point out how much time had passed since her works could be seen in museums in Poland. In 1988, the Warsaw magazine Nowa Wieś jokingly proposed to form a new, women-only government in the Polish People’s Republic: ‘The era of men belongs to the past’, we read. It’s unclear whether the author behind the idea was driven by the spirit of a feminist revolution or rather by the wish to make fun of it; regardless, the newspaper presented the proposed composition of such a government. Among the photographs of then-celebrities – actresses, singers, writers, sportswomen – the spread features a photograph of Abakanowicz, captioned ‘Own direction in textile art – monumental, three-dimensional forms known as abakans’. In the new government, the artist was supposed to serve the role of the deputy prime minister (a prime minister wasn’t appointed).

Meanwhile, the abakans were increasingly often and in increasingly large numbers accompanied at exhibitions by series of figurative works. The tapestries were relegated to the background in the role of ‘historical’ context for Abakanowicz’s oeuvre. In 1988, a large Abakanowicz retrospective was held in Budapest, which exhibition featured works from all periods in her career. The Polish press was eager to write about the artist’s success among ‘our brothers, Hungarians’ and about ‘an over ten-metre-long banner with the word “Abakanowicz” on the colonnade of the Gallery’. Her art would attract large crowds and thus officially became export art.

Polish journalists were deeply invested in following the artist’s every step, describing exhibitions, visits to her studio, and citing her statements. They were also keen to mention her international successes, even those related to countries from outside the Eastern bloc. Popularity on such a scale, at home and abroad – she attracted press interest on the other side of the Iron Curtain, too – was something very few artists in Polish People’s Republic, and especially women artists, could enjoy. Although Abakanowicz’s works were rather neutral politically, and the artist herself would explicitly disavow creating political narratives, she was undoubtedly an artist accepted by the regime’s authorities. The national press was limited by the sieve of censorship – they wrote about those whom they were allowed to write about, and the unexpectedly abundant press materials devoted to the artist prove that he was one of such people. Owing to this established position of hers, not even the political breakthrough of the late 1980s could hinder her international career.

The human condition, in general

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Magdalena Abakanowicz with her installation titled ‘Bambini’, photo: Włodzimierz Wasyluk

Picture image

Magdalena Abakanowicz i jej instalacja "Bambini", fot. Włodzimierz Wasyluk

In the final decade of the 20th century, Abakanowicz focused on developing her figurative series. Her exhibitions featured the cycles Incarnations, Anonymous Portraits and War Games (1987–1995) as well as sculptures depicting animals.

However, the abakans weren’t forgotten – they unfailingly featured at comprehensive exhibitions and in articles about the artist. What’s more, it was them that usually made headlines at the time. Their legacy was so strong that one journalist, reporting for the newspaper Życie Warszawy on the Recent Works exhibition at the Ujazdów Castle (1988), collectively referred to all of the presented works as abakans – even though the exposition included only new group sculptures (Birds, Conglomerate, Glass Case with Fifteen Corners). Similarly, when a comprehensive exhibition of Abakanowicz’s works opened at the Polish Sculpture Centre in Orońsko in 1995, the heading of Dorota Jarecka’s article for Gazeta Wyborcza daily announced that visitors would get to admire the ‘long unseen abakans’. Although the woven spatial forms constitute a closed chapter, they still function as a synonym of the artist’s whole oeuvre.

The 1990s also brought about increasingly frequent erotic readings of abakans. The artist herself reportedly disavowed feminist and erotic interpretations of her early works; still, she couldn’t control how others would interpret them. Reviewing the Orońsko exhibition, Elżbieta Dzikowska deemed some of them ‘gems of erotic art, which the author didn’t wish to be associated with, but that’s simply how it is’. Dorota Jarecka referred to abakans as ‘erotic creatures’, while Kinga Kawalerowicz wrote that to her mind, they resembled ‘parting shells of a clam or vaginas of goddesses-giantesses’, as well as that they contain ‘dominating sensuality’.

When the Orońsko exhibition was moved to Warsaw, viewers could also see an enormous group of 212 jute bag figures cured with resin, titled Hurma. The press was in awe of the scale of the artist’s figurative works and commented on the universality of their message. Reflections on subsequent new series almost always culminated in the pompous reading of them as stories of ‘the human fate’. The discourse was dominated by semantically vague catchphrases. Like a mantra, commenters would repeat the words ‘the timeless tragedy of human existence’, which was the supposed subject matter of Alterations.

Jaromir Jedliński ascribed to a dramatic pedigree to Alterations, which were, according to him, derived from the artist’s ‘distressing experiences’. The critic also cited an anecdote from the 1980 showcase of the series, when the author, asked about the meaning of the works: ‘Is this Auschwitz?’, ‘Is this a Peruvian religious ceremony?’, ‘Is this the Ramayana dance?’, reportedly responded: ‘All these questions can be answered in the affirmative, because the series touches upon the human condition in general’. Meanwhile Jarecka claimed: ‘Figures whose forms are inspired by human bodies are the closest to death, whereas compositions far removed from mimicking human shapes are the most alive and lively’.

Time passed

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

‘Negev’ by Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1987, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, photo: DYKT Mohigan / CC BY 2.0

Picture image

abakanowicz_israel_rzezba.jpg

Although the responses to the new series were predominantly enthusiastic, there was no shortage of critical comments, too. One example would be the one by Jan Michalski, concerning the works of Abakanowicz exhibited at the Starmach Gallery in 1998. The Kraków-based critic wrote that the aesthetic of those pieces evokes an association with ‘time passed’, and he subsequently located the artist’s figurative works in the realm of post-war didactic and martyrological art, employing the style of an ‘excavation area around some tomb’. In the 21^st century, comments by Łukasz Gorczyca and Michał Kaczyński expressed similar criticism. When these representatives of the new generation of critics compiled, in their periodical Raster, a list of Poland’s top ten artists of 2001, they supplemented it with ‘auxiliary’ categories: most underrated artists and most overrated ones. The magazine editors placed Abakanowicz in the latter category and explained their decision this way:

Text

Over the long years of her glorious career, the artist, well-known in Poland and worldwide, has earned […] the title of ‘most overrated’ one for life. Last years, she was particularly overrated by director [of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, ed.] Krukowski when he showcased her crowd of bags as a part of the permanent exhibition – money isn’t everything!

The attitude of the Gorzyca–Kaczyński duo towards Abakanowicz’s work is accurately conveyed by the nickname they coined for the artist, referring to her in their texts as ‘Magdalena Formalin Abakanowicz’.

The editors of Raster also attached Abakanowicz’s name to two entries in the dictionary of trends in art. One of them was ‘pałeryzm’, which, as the authors explain, began in the mid-1970s and intensified in the next decade, when it ‘flourished together with the martyrology of martial law’. [The Polish word pała means ‘truncheon’ but can also be a vulgar word for a penis, trans.] They define the term thus: ‘it refers not only to the monumental size of the works but also to pały, that is, vertical forms, which pałeryści prefer. Pałeryzm is characterised, first and foremost, by gross exaggeration and pathos, and, in extreme cases, also thoroughly unambiguous meaning of the works. Their main motif is the human figure’. Another phenomenon of which Abakanowicz was the main representative (together with Jerzy Bereś) was ‘poverism’, etymologically derived from the Arte Povera movement popular in 1960s’ Italy and characterised by ‘poverty – originally the poverty of materials, in the Polish version also intellectual poverty, and that’, continue Gorczyca and Kaczyński, ‘is our nation’s contribution to the development of that movement, which the world has somewhat forgotten by now’.

Similar criticism was later expressed by Adam Mazur in his review of the exhibition Art Comes Before Gold at the Museum of Modern Art (2009), who noted although those ‘people from the art world at a pre-retirement age’ whom he knows ‘disavow abakanic jerseys’, still those figures ‘keep returning like a broken record’. He also referred to the mantras of critics writing about ‘the human condition’: ‘Clearly, the condition of a headless, anonymous 20^th century human doesn’t really apply to the century that followed’. It seems, then, that the more frequently Abakanowicz’s post-figurative breakthrough works were shown, the more derivative they became in the eyes of the critics, the more literal in their pomposity and lacklustre meaning-wise.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

The ‘Abakanowicz. No Rules. Tapestries and Abakans at the Wawel Castle’exhibition, Wawel Royal Castle, 2025, photo: Jeremi Dobrzański / Wawel Royal Castle

Picture image

abakanowicz_w_komnatach_1.jpg

Interestingly, Abakanowicz enacted a change and transvaluation at a moment when she could actually capitalise, mostly symbolically, on her revolutionary approach to textile art. Close scrutiny of her critical reception demonstrates that she was by no means unambiguously thrown into the category of textile art, commonly seen as stuck firmly in the past. Quite the contrary. Perhaps, had she continued her work, she could have helped the field shed the – admittedly rather accurate – label of one preserved in amber. Indeed, she could have made it into ‘great art’ which she always aspired to be associated with – after all, the artist sometimes categorised abakans as sculptures herself. Instead, however, her anxiety not to be pigeonholed as a ‘weaved’ set off a self-fulfilling prophecy: Abakanowicz rediscovered textile art for the whole world and retrieved it from the time warp only to later place it back there again, dismissing the field she herself revolutionised as one doomed from the start to stand no chance when set against ‘serious art’ – and then fleeing into the realm of conventional sculpture.

Meanwhile, abakans never ceased to intrigue, to enchant with their virtuosic tension of forms, their dialogue with space, the force of their colours, the painstaking workmanship. They were majestic. Through them, Abakanowicz proved that she could achieve what she intended – to create a new quality, a new art form. Perhaps it’s owing to them after all that Magdalena Abakanowicz was an indisputably outstanding artist (who needn’t be labelled) – a fact to which they can still testify today.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

Language English

textiles

sculpture

magdalena abakanowicz

abakans

raster

Polish Textiles