Untitled (Model for Landscape), 1976
With a selection of work spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s, Next is our skin, an exhibition of work by the trailblazing Polish sculptor and fiber artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017), examines the evolution of the artist's practice and her continuous inquiry into the human condition. Next is our skin traces this line of inquiry specifically through her use of materials—from the earliest work in fiber, Szara, an abstract weaving from 1965, whose natural sisal and horse hair protrude from the surface as if to animate the work, to the more disquieting figurative works from the 1980s and ’90s. Working first in burlap and later in bronze, Abakanowicz’s art represents the human struggle to maintain individuality against political and social oppression. The exhibition is on view at GRAY New York through June 26, 2026.
The essay below by curator, writer, and educator Mary Jane Jacob was commissioned to accompany the works on view in this exhibition.
Red Hair, 1970-72
Figurative art had its ups and downs over the last century. Yet its story is eternal, its presence in art inescapable. When Magdalena Abakanowicz turned to the human form in 1974, it was seen as a turn away from the abstraction, as well as the materiality, of her celebrated woven Abakans. But the figure, or perhaps, humanity, was always front-of-mind for the artist.
Szara, 1965
In the exhibition Next is our skin, an exceptional, important early work on view is titled Szara (1965). The piece foreshadows her Heads from a decade later, and her crowning achievement, Embryology (1978-’80), a massive work held in Tate’s collection that debuted at the 1980 Venice Biennial. We see the ovoid form re-emerging from the rectangular frame of Vieux Rouge (1983) as well, and also in between her woven constructions embodying arteries, lungs, or intestines spilling out onto the gallery floor. This ovoid shape evokes eggs and organs, and the rounded bodily shapes of our heads, chests, bellies, and limbs. The human form has always been present for this artist: “The issue of inside-outside has always appeared in my work; it’s such a mystery that I keep returning to it.”[1]
With Untitled (Model for Landscape) (1976)—which brings into one form both body and terrain—we see she found the same duality in nature. As the artist says, “For a long time, I couldn’t use wood. I saw it as an entity finished in itself. Some years ago, inside an old tree trunk, I suddenly discovered its core, a spine entwined with channels of juices and nerves. I saw the carnality of another trunk with limbs cut off, as if amputated.”[2] Abakanowicz’s first figures were cast from industrial burlap. She knew that fiber matches us: “We are fibrous structures …”[3]
Pink Small Figure I, 1993
There were many separate series in the works she created, each uniquely formed and carrying the imprint of her hand. And every entity had its own individuality and vulnerability: from the honest forms of her lesser-known women like Female Figure (1985-’86), to the tenderness of Pink Small Figure I (1993), to the mercurial stance of Small Figure on a Hexahedron (1993). In each, Abakanowicz confronts our differences in spite of our sameness, the sameness despite our difference. She later discovered for herself bronze and other materials, as seen in Samotna Figure (On Bench) (1989), continuing her need to speak of both the single individual and the collective.
In both life and art, Abakanowicz understood that we are but a part of that larger sphere. Her figures speak most directly to this observation: “I am a historic being, like all of us. Like all of us, I carry within myself an ample portion of humanity prior to history. On this ahistoric part of my being—of every being—is impressed, like an effigy, a memory of the most ancient sensations and feelings.”[4]
“I am a historic being, like all of us. Like all of us, I carry within myself an ample portion of humanity prior to history. On this a historic part of my being—of every being—is impressed, like an effigy, a memory of the most ancient sensations and feelings.”
—Magdalena Abakanowicz
A child of World War II, she believed in the power of human imagination in seeking a better future. Yet decade after decade, the seeming inevitability of war led her to a profound frustration, the sense that our actions destroy our very being, and that our disregard for the planet destroys everything else. “We have to obey our instincts otherwise they can destroy us…. we bear in ourselves chaos. The high degree of civilization and of intellectualization of life lead us, the whole human species, to self-destruction…. Playing with things which are not fully understood we get unpredictable results which we don’t know how to deal with.”[5]
Yet she continued to believe in art as “a necessity integrated into human nature.” This was in spite of its vexed place in history:
Art is an astonishing activity of mankind deriving from constant struggle between wisdom and madness, dream and reality under our skull.…It does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine. I remember the terrifying Hitler doctrine “Art for the population” (Kunst dem Volk) that brought great artists into prison or exile. I went through the experience of “socialistic realism” imposed upon us by Soviets. I remember very well its pressure on the creative freedom and the deep destruction of culture it caused. Art is an astonishing activity of mankind deriving from constant struggle between wisdom and madness, dream and reality under our skull.… It does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.[6]
Samotna Figure (On Bench), 1989
Abakanowicz found economic success after the touring of her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which resulted in a string of solo exhibitions. This led Abakanowicz and her husband Jan Kosmowski to imagine a forward-thinking foundation—one open to creative exploration, rooted in their shared concern for the future and a sense of responsibility to give back. It is thanks to this initiative that in 2022, the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation teamed up with the European League of Institutions of Art to launch a mentorship program of offering academic and moral support among fifteen arts universities throughout the Ukraine and more than thirty throughout the EU. It continues today, despite the war.
This artist, whose experience was shaped by invasion and war, also believed (as did much of the postwar world) in the constancy and necessity of American democracy on the international stage. Abakanowicz would be soberly amazed at the turn of world events that have brought us to a world war today, even if it is not so named. Yet she would wisely remind us that artists play an important role—for sustaining creativity and connections amongst different peoples is the only way out.
1. Magdalena Abakanowicz: Writings and Conversations, ed. Mary Jane Jacob and Jenny Dally (Milan 2022), 247.
2. Ibid, 173.
3. Ibid, 50
4. Ibid, 36.
5. Ibid, 212-213.
6. Ibid, 277.
All quotes of the artist from See Magdalena Abakanowicz: Writings and Conversations, ed. Mary Jane Jacob and Jenny Dally, Milan 2022. See pages numbers provided above.
Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1970. © Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation and Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej à Varsovie, Photo: Artur Starewicz.
Magdalena Abakanowicz (b. 1930, Poland, d. 2017) gained international recognition as a female artist working in the Soviet Union, and her influence in fiber arts profoundly expanded the impact of textiles as both material and concept. Throughout Abakanowicz’s adolescence, state repression haunted her artistic output. Her parents were part of the Polish resistance under Nazi occupation, where Hitler’s doctrine of “Art for the Population” (Kunst dem Volk) resulted in the imprisonment and exiling of Poland’s most innovative artists. During Communist rule, when the state defined acceptable modes of artistic production, Abakanowicz was trained in Social Realism at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sopot and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the early 1950s.
Weaving presented a unique opportunity to create work less prone to regulations and censorship due to its longstanding association with decorative arts. Mentored by fiber artist Maria Łaszkiewicz, Abakanowicz smuggled her vocational training into a radical critique of authoritarianism and commentary on the human condition. Her work questions the role of the individual amidst the collective, rejecting the Soviet demand for functional, propagandistic art in favor of a primordial mysticism, or, in the artist’s words, “a memory of the most ancient sensations and feelings.”
Abakanowicz worked as a professor at the University of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland, for twenty-five years, before a 1984 visiting professor position at University of California Los Angeles. After her first solo shows in the United States in the early 1980s, Abakanowicz and her husband Jan Kosmowski founded the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation, which, in 2022, began a collaboration with the European League of Institutions of Art to launch a program among fifteen arts universities throughout Ukraine.
Her work can be found in public collections internationally, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Netherlands; the Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, and many others.
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Artwork © Fundacja Marty Magdaleny Abakanowicz Kosmowskiej I Jana Kosmowskiego, Warsaw.