Magdalena Abakanowicz. Prologue

We recall Magdalena Abakanowicz’s first solo exhibition. After a festival of presentations of the artist’s most celebrated and revolutionary achievements at Europe’s notable international institutions associated with contemporary art, including the famous Tate Modern in London, we go back to the beginning of her creative path – her debut in 1960. This allows us to look at the first consciously constructed art show through the prism of the ideas developed by Abakanowicz in later realisations or in the light of her achievements, which changed the outlook on the materiality of fabric, of working with space and which shaped a new language of forms.

In her exhibition at the time, Abakanowicz broke with the traditional roles ascribed to fabric and took up issues related to the language of visual arts. It was a gesture of abandoning the framework in the formal sense, as well as a conscious decision to work with the space. While post-war painting of the 1950s remained reduced to small formats due to material shortages, and censorship limited the presence of abstraction to fifteen per cent in public presentation spaces, Magdalena Abakanowicz went beyond these restrictions. She presented abstract compositions on the surface of canvases spread across space.

The painterly compositions, shown in the exhibition, were her designs, which she transferred onto fabrics that had been freed from their frames and loosely suspended in space. Their elastic surfaces yielded to the movement of air. Freed from the wall and any structural elements, they annexed the space. The lack of a frames opened up freedom of expression. In 1958, Wojciech Fangor and Stanisław Zamecznik realised the first “Study of Space”. Two years later, the young artist made a similar gesture through her installation. She entered the space with an arrangement of free-form, large, abstract-biological canvases. She was attracted to the large scale.

Magdalena Abakanowicz used consciously guided light to build the plans and dramaturgy of the message. Already at that time, thinking of the exhibition as a whole multi-element statement, she initiated the process, which she later developed, of building in situ installations that interact with the architecture. Later, she will go a step further, creating worlds designed for sensual experience.

We look at this exhibition today through the artist’s path of international success, knowledge of the theories, interpretations and contexts of her art in order to re-read her first artistic gestures.

Curators: Marta Kowalewska (Central Textile Museum and Abakanowicz Foundation), Henryk Gac
Cooperation: Kordegarda curatorial team – Katarzyna Haber, Agnieszka Bebłowska Bednarkiewicz
Organizers: Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, National Centre for Culture
Partner: Marta Magdalena Abakanowicz Kosmowska and Jan Kosmowski Foundation

Poster graphics using the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1960 entitled Fabric / © Marta Magdalena Abakanowicz Kosmowska and Jan Kosmowski Foundation