Magdalena Abakanowicz @ Marlborough Gallery, New York

Magdalena Abakanowicz: Embodied Forms
Marlborough Gallery, New York
February 7 - March 10, 2018

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Abakan Rouge III, 1971

Sisal weaving

127 x 78 3/4 in., 322.6 x 200 cm 

© the Estate of Magdalena Abakanowicz and Marlborough Gallery, New York

Marlborough Gallery presents Embodied Forms, the first exhibition dedicated to the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz since her recent death at the age of 86. Opening on Wednesday, Februrary 7, the exhibition will feature a broad selection of the artist’s work ranging from 1971 to 2009, including key works from four of her series: Abakans, Crowds, War Games and Coexistence.

Magdalena Abakanowicz is recognized as one of the most unique and potent voices in contemporary art. Her installations and sculptures, at once beautiful and unsettling, are a reminder of the fragile nature of the human condition. As a child, the artist endured the trauma of living in occupied Poland during WWII. This experience prompted a lifelong awareness of existential concerns and a unique sculptural vocabulary. She said of that time, “When I was 12 in 1942, one could only escape from human cruelty inside oneself (into a world of dreams, imaginings)”. This kind of mental departure – self-defense against omnipresent propaganda and destruction – informed her artistic output for decades to come.

In the early 1960s, when fiber objects were considered “craft” as opposed to “art,” Magdalena Abakanowicz taught herself how to dye and weave discarded rope to create the immense, suspended, anatomical forms within her small living space in Warsaw. The works defied easy classification and stood against any established definitions. Marlborough is delighted to exhibit a selection of these woven sisal works, known as the Abakans. “Monumental, strong, soft and erotic,” Abakanowicz writes, “these objects became the image of my reality.”

Beginning in the 1980s, Magdalena Abakanowicz channeled her deeply personal feelings about loss, isolation, displacement and regeneration into sculptures of crowds—figures in burlap and later, bronze, that articulate both the harmony and rupture within multitudes. Shown in the exhibition will be the artist’s Coexistence, a group of 13 burlap figures from 2002, and concurrently showing at Marlborough Contemporary, at 545 W. 25th Street, 2nd Floor, will be Crowd IV, a group of 24 figures realized between 1989 and 1990. Addressing the theme of multitudes, the artist writes:

I feel overawed by quantity where counting no longer makes sense. By unrepeatability 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 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. 

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Coexistence (13), 2002

Burlap, each unique

Dimensions variable

© the Estate of Magdalena Abakanowicz and Marlborough Gallery, New York

In addition, the exhibition will include three major works from the artist’s War Games series: Marrow Bone, Errant and Kos. This series was first presented in the United States in 1993 in a solo exhibition curated by Michael Brenson at MoMA PS1. Both broken and indestructible, each work articulates a different personality imbued with its own tragedy and capacity for violence.

During her lifetime, Magdalena Abakanowicz had over 150 solo exhibitions in Europe, North and South America, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. In 1999, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, held an exhibition entitled Abakanowicz on the Roof, a solo presentation of the artist on the museum’s rooftop. That same year, the Jardins du Palais Royal in Paris held an exhibition for the artist. Among numerous prizes and distinctions, Magdalena Abakanowicz received seven honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and the United States as well as the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France and Cavaliere dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. She was also awarded the prestigious International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement award in 2005 as well as the Grand Cross of Merit (Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern) from the Federal Republic of Germany in 2010.

In the past thirty years Magdalena Abakanowicz developed a number of site-specific sculpture installations that incorporate multiple figures or elements of increased scale. Among these are Negev at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1987; Space of Dragon, Olympic Park, Seoul, South Korea, 1985; Becalmed Beings, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan, 1993; Space of Unknown Growth, Europos Parkas, Vilnius, Lithuania, 1997-98; Unrecognized, Citadel Park, Poznan, Poland, 2002; Space of Stone, Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey, 2003; and her last major public work, Agora, a sculptural group comprised of 106 unique cast-iron figures measuring over nine-feet tall permanently installed in Chicago’s Grant Park in 2006.

Magdalena Abakanowicz’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, New York; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Karuizawa, Japan, among others.

Magdalena Abakanowicz joined Marlborough Gallery in 1989, where she presented over twenty solo exhibitions. Marlborough Gallery is grateful to Professor Mary Jane Jacob for her help in the realization of this exhibition. An illustrated catalogue will be available at the time of the exhibition. 

MARLBOROUGH GALLERY 
40 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019
www.marlboroughgallery.com

Abakanowicz, Bourgeois, Caro - Marlborough Chelsea, New York - Inaugural Exhibition

Abakanowicz, Bourgeois, Caro

Marlborough Chelsea, New York

September 18 - October 25, 1997

For its inaugural exhibition, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, presents sculptures by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Louise Bourgeois and Sir Anthony Caro. 

The gallery's inaugural exhibition presents one work each by Abakanowicz, Bourgeois and Caro. Each of these works through their physical and conceptual presence, commands and defines the gallery's architectural spaces, creating three interrelated but markedly different environments. These sculptures are of such independent and forceful character that they dominate their environments through the drama of a physical discourse that captures the viewer as if he or she had stumbled into a theater and onto a stage occupied by giants.

Magdalena Abakanowicz channels her deeply personal feelings about loss, isolation, displacement and regeneration as experienced throughout her childhood in Poland into her sculpture. Gouged and smooth bronze surfaces display the marks of the artist's fingers and nails; her work becomes an expressionist rendering in three-dimensional form of angst, aggression and strength. Rather than representing a single historical moment, group or tragedy, Magdalena Abakanowicz says that her work "is about the human condition in general". Backward Seated Figures (1992-93), comprised of 20 bronze forms, suggests a crowd of people seated on the floor, hunched over slightly. The air between each sculpture is heavy and fraught with tension; the installation creates a mood which fills the gallery and pushes at the walls, enveloping the viewer. The installation at Marlborough Chelsea will be the first showing of this piece in the United States.

A native of France, American sculptor Louise Bourgeois' work developed initially in the 1940s through her exposure to the Surrealists. Her later works reflect a continuing interest in feminism and forms related to the body. While many of her recent projects have explored and represented personal recollections of childhood memories and experiences through seemingly fragile and delicate forms, Eyes (1995), included in this exhibition, is monumentally forceful in both its physical and conceptual presence. The pair of massive granite spherical eyes with hemispherical irises captures everything that falls within their gaze. At the direction of  Louise Bourgeois, the eyes have been positioned at a distance apart to reflect the proportions of a monolithic face. The eyes are positioned to create a field of vision and depth of focus that extends beyond the walls of the gallery into the city - the sculpture is both a corporeal anchor and conceptual window.

British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, who recently joined Marlborough for his North American representation, shapes mass and the spaces which his forms inhabit in a powerful yet carefully constructed way. His new work created specifically for this exhibition, Wareham Ziggurat (1997), rises over 12 feet high with its towering stepped shape. Ascending from floor to ceiling, the work forces one's attention upwards into the spaces that most sculpture does not reach. Because of the internal architectural "rooms" within the sculpture, the spectator is drawn inside and therefore deals with both external and internal notions of architectural form and space. The giant railroad sleepers from which the sculpture is made are stacked high like a vast pyramid, giving the work a physicality that is primal, ancient and mysteriously ritualistic in character.

Abakanowicz, Bourgeois, Caro will be followed by a group show curated by Raymond Foye, on view from November 1 through November 29, 1997. An exhibition of work by Spanish sculptor Francisco Leiro opens December 3, and will remain on view through January 3, 1998.

Marlborough Chelsea

211 West 19th Street, New York, NY

www.malgoroughgallery.com