Essay, Research Paper: Magdelana Abakanowicz

Magdelana Abakanowicz was born in 1930 near Falenty, Poland. She studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, and sought to escape from the conventional art forms through weaving. Abakanowicz creates sculpture in bronze, wood, steel, ceramic, and burlap. Her main subjects are human and animal figures presented in large groups of 50, 80, or 150 exemplars. Abakanowicz also works in drawing, painting, choreographing dances, and architectural projects. Her work can be seen in museums all over the world. Often in her work she explores the alerted reality created by groups of sculpture in a gallery while also drawing heavily upon her personal and family history. Abakanowicz's work demonstrates an evolution from themes to dwellings, to humans, to the primality of organic growth itself. Abakanowicz's strong idealism and forceful speaking style suggest a productive tenacity born of a defensive self-belief. She feels "overawed by the quantity where counting no longer makes sense. By unrepeatedly within such a quantity. By creatures of nature gathered in herds, droves, species, in which each individual, while subservient to the mass, retains some distinguishing features. A crowd of people, birds, insects, or leaves is a mysterious assemblage of variants of certain prototype. A riddle of nature's abhorrence of exact repetition or inability to produce it. Just as the human hand cannot repeat its own gesture, I invoke this disturbing law, switching my own immobile herds into that rhythm."�