Children. Around the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz

In May, the Senate of the Republic of Poland declared 2027 the Year of Magdalena Abakanowicz. We start this celebration earlier, together with the Academy of Fine Arts organizing a scientific session dedicated to this outstanding artist.

Magdalena Abakanowicz studied at the State High School of Fine Arts in Gdynia, in 1949 she began her studies at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, and a year later she moved to the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. International fame was brought to her participation in the International Textile Biennale in Lausanne in 1962 with the three-dimensional installation Composition of White Forms. For this groundbreaking, both in the art of cloth and sculpture, the work received in 1965 the gold medal at the São Paulo Biennale. Her monumental, spatial forms of wool, linen, thread and dyed sisal fiber were called abakanas after the artist's name.

Since the mid-1970s, monumental humanoid sculptures began to play an increasingly important role in her work. There were then, among others, Alterations — twelve hollow figures sitting in a row, Heads — large forms resembling human heads without faces, and Backs and Sitting Figures depicting human bodies. The theme of an anonymous man portrayed as part of a larger collective has become one of the most important themes of her work.

In the years 1986—2008, groups of sculptures depicting standing figures were created: Tłum I, Tłum II, Tłum III, Magi, Hurma, Bambini and Inverceni. In these works, the artist addressed the themes of the relationship between the individual and the collective, anonymity and the experience of human existence. Since the early 1980s, she has also carried out monumental outdoor projects, which she called “spaces of experience”. They were created mainly outside the borders of Poland. Among the most important are the Sarcophagi in glass houses in France - four forms of wood and metal resembling sarcophagi enclosed in glazed structures; Katarsis near Florence - a group of 33 bronze cast impersonal figures about three meters high; the Negev at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem - seven stone circles with a diameter of 280 centimeters; The Dragon Space in Seoul, folding consisting of ten monumental animal heads or the Space of Silenced Lives in Hiroshima, composed of 40 cast bronze figures of supernatural size from the Back cycle .

6 November 2026, 10.00 am | Patio of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk