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 they 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 beyond the entry space. As soon as it is glimpsed, the drama between sculpture and viewer begins. An ominous army of life-sized armless, headless bodies, naked and wrinkled as used paper bags, invades the room. Walking around them one sees that the burlap-covered rows - like teeth on a zipper - and are hollow in the back, seeming to observe us even without eyes.
If commentators bring an interpretation of the worst horrors of the twentieth century to the work of this European artist - concentration camps, mass graves, the terrifying irrationality of violence, "liberation" and a different boot slamming down on the neck, waiting for bread, waiting for jobs, waiting for place to live, waiting for space of one's own, waiting for speak, to think, to feel authentically - they are not wrong. But these views offer too narrow a periphery. All of man's history is the time frame in which Abakanowicz moves. Her subject is civilization.
Mart Magdalena Abakanowicz Kosmowska was born in the countryside outside Warsaw, Poland, in 1930 and lived in a large house on the five thousand-acre family estate of parkland, woods, water, meadows, and farms. She was "a very shy child," she said in an interview in New York before the opening of her exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery. She lived in austere isolation amid a certain grandeur: There were "no children around" but, one gathers from her accounts, there was a preoccupied father and a beautiful but aloof mother.
As a small child she became an intimate of nature. From it she drew protection and the secret of learning to be an artificer, a creator of magic. She borrowed nature's toys and set them on her own stage. She also made her own objects, to have
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