In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Abakanowicz started to exhibit her charcoal drawings (Torsos, Faces, 1981, Heads, 1987) and paintings (oils from the series Faces Which Are Not Portraits (1983) and began to publish her comments about her art:
When examining man, I am in fact examining myself... My forms are the skins I strip off myself one by one, marking the milestones along my road. Each time they belong so much to me and I belong to them so that we cannot exist without one another. Soft, they contain an infinite number of possible shapes of which only one can be selected by myself as the right, meaningful one. I create space for them in exhibition rooms where they radiate the energy I have given them. They exist with me, they depend on me, I depend on them … Without me they make no sense, like discarded body parts separated from the torso.
This self-commentary seems to refer also to Abakanowicz's previous artistic pursuits, the Abakans – even though they may not look like works rooted in specific personal experience or emotions and are far removed from the total, crowdy anonymity of Heads or Backs. Perhaps it is so because ‘Abakans’ retain the unique character of the fabric and their strong colours disregard the natural colour of the material – there is a Red Abakan (1967); Brown Abakan (1969-72); Orange Clothes (1969); Black Environment (1970-78); Black Clothes with Sacks (1971). Abakanowicz’s later works lose their individuality in a double way: through the artist multiplying one shape and through her adopting one, monochromatic colour scheme, defined by the properties of the material. Abakanowicz has followed this approach in most of her artistic endeavours.
War Games
In 1989 she brought out her War Games – monumental structures of huge trunks of old trees, their branches and bark removed, partly bandaged with rags and hugged with steel hoops. Placed on lattice metal stands, they look a bit like chariots of fire or artillery vehicles. Abakanowicz gave them meaningful names, such as Baz, Ukon, Runa, bringing to mind forgotten languages, magic and primaeval rituals, and has thus created her own, symbolic rather than straightforward, text. These inspirations were drawn from her 1976 trip ‘to the sources of energy’: New Guinea, Celebes, Bali, Sumatra, Java and Thailand. Still, she insists that the title of the series was given by chance. Says Abakanowicz:
This title is atypical of my work. Other names are either strictly descriptive, like 'Backs' or 'Seated Figures', or very distant, metaphorical, like 'Embriology', which refers to science and not to a set of objects sewn from sackcloth. If that series had a different name, it may have evoked totally different association.
One of the artist's most interesting works, War Games seem ambivalent. On one hand, they emanate negative, ‘military’ energy, are huge and dominant; on the other, they are helpless stumps. They may be regarded as a statement whose metaphorical message applies not only to ‘human condition’ understood as entanglement in existential problems, but also to ways in which man takes part in History and Art. The artist herself has pointed to the possibility of putting some of her works in a specific historical perspective. Asked by Zbigniew Taranienko: ‘Has it been noticed in Poland that, while ambiguous, your works have political overtones?‘, Abakanowicz answered: ‘It was not noticed even during martial law, when in 1981 I exhibited The Cage at the Catholic University of Lublin, nor during the 1987 exhibition of Anonymous Portraits, which used plinths that looked like the support of a guillotine’.
Abakanowicz started providing more extensive commentary on her works 20 years ago. She has emphasised her Tartar ancestry, discussed her war experience, talked openly about her attitude to communist Poland. Prior to that, she had mostly shared her experience of understanding the matter, that is something that did not go beyond the process of sculpting. She has always been fascinated by the interior of the matter and has always felt it impermanent. She reminisces:
I was very young. I crouched down over a boggy pond to watch tadpoles. … I could distinctly see tangles of guts through the thin membranes which covered their distended bellies. … Brought with a stick to the shore, touched roughly, their distended bellies would burst, their knotty, disorderly contents flowing out. … I was sitting, my heart pounding, shocked by what has happened, by the destruction of the soft life and the infinite mystery of the soft contents. … Years later things which were soft, with a complex tissue, became my material.
Initially, however, the explanations she provided for her works did not include such direct references. It was as if she had taken care to hide certain meanings, intent on defending the inner homogeneity of her artwork. Asked by viewers and critics whether Backs was a reference to ‘Auschwitz or a religious ceremony in Peru or Ramayana’s dance?‘, she would reply that all those answers were legitimate, for the man that interested her was ‘not the man of a certain time, he is the man as such’, and that her art was simply a universal ‘tale of the human condition’.
She ultimately stated: ‘I keep working on the same old story, one as old as existence itself, I keep talking about it, about the fears, disappointments and longings that it brings along’.
Spatial experiences
A number of Abakanowicz's projects, particularly the monumental ones, were displayed in open spaces, the vast majority outside of Poland. She refers to them as ‘spatial experiences’ which can also be considered ‘spaces of emotions’. Such projects have included: Sarkophagi in Glass Houses (France 1983-89), Negev (Israel 1987 – seven stone circles), Space of Dragon (South Korea 1988 – 10 metaphorical bronze animal heads), The Frozen (Japan 1993 – 40 bronze figures), Hand-Like Trees (USA 1993 – five metaphorical bronze trees), Space of Unknown Growth (Lithuania 1997-98 – 22 concrete forms), Walking Figures (USA 1999 – 20 bronze figures), Birds - Knowledge of Good and Evil (USA 2001 – six bird-alike aluminium figures), Space of Stone (USA 2002 – 22 granite boulders). The largest of such installations, a group of 112 cast-iron figures entitled Unrecognised (2002), is in Poland, inside Poznań's Cytadela Park. Another Polish town, Elbląg, is home to the first-ever artefact permanently placed in a non-gallery environment, the tree-like steel form which Abakanowicz created during the 1st Biennial of Spatial Forms in 1965.
In 1991 Abakanowicz received a commission from Paris city authorities to develop the western side of La Defence. The result – a bold conception of ‘arboreal architecture’ – was, however, never implemented. Another architectural project of hers was The Hand (1994), a design of a ‘tower sculpture’ commissioned by Hiroshima town authorities to commemorate victims of the nuclear bomb. Like with La Defense, the artist intended the walls of her construction to be, over time, overgrown with plants. The design, alas, was not implemented. In 2006, Chicago authorities commissioned Agora – 106 iron cast figures, each about 9 feet tall, depicting a figure from the waist-down, frozen in mid-step. They're displayed at Chicago Grant Park. In 2010, the city of Warsaw commissioned the artist's first open-air project – the legendary knights Wizard, Percival, Lancelot and Galahad were recreated as abstract steel figures, each weighing some 400 kg, are a permanent exposition in Warsaw's Romuald Traugutt Park.
Abakanowicz's open-air projects build upon her previous works, continuing her commentary on the state of man. They do so either directly, showing man’s incomplete, damaged, suffering body, or metaphorically, through the (natural or historical) context in which they are positioned. In 1975, she admitted that she was:
likely to keep giving up some techniques and materials in favour of others, without losing, however, the core message. The most interesting thing is to use techniques you are not familiar with and build forms you do not know.
The diversity of Abakanowicz's work testifies to her unflagging inventiveness and to her skill in practising her creed: ‘I do not like rules and regulations. They are enemies of imagination’.
Abakanowicz has for years been among the group of artists represented by the Marlborough Gallery. In 1965-90 she taught at the State School of Fine Arts (nowadays the Academy of Fine Arts) in Poznań. She has also been a guest lecturer in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Boston, New York, San Diego, Sydney and Tokyo.
Her numerous awards include the Grand Prix of the 8th Biennial of Tapestry Art in São Paulo (1965), Gottfried von Herder Prize, Vienna (1979), The Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation Award, New York (1982), Sculpture Centre, New York (1993), Leonardo da Vinci, Mexico (1997), Visionaries l, American Craft Museum, New York (2000); distinctions: Commodore's Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1998), Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Paris, France (1999), Cavaliere nell Ordine Al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (2000); honorary doctorates: Royal College of Art, London (1974), Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (USA, 1992), Academy of Fine Arts, Lódź (1997), Pratt Institute, New York (2000), Massachusetts College of Art, Boston (2001), School of the Art Institute, Chicago (2002), Academy of Fine Arts, Poznań (2002). She is also a member of the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin (since 1994), American Academy of Arts and Letters (since 1996), Sachsische Akademie der Kunste in Dresden (since 1998), Orden Pour le merite für Wissenschaften und Kunste in Berlin (since 2000).