Description

Magdalena Abakanowicz was born to a noble family of Tartar descent. She was thirteen years old when she helped as a nurse in Warsaw during WWII. After the war, her family had to move near Gdańsk where she started her artistic education. Later on, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts where she suffered because of state-sponsored social realism. She became an internationally acclaimed textile artist. Her practice always navigated around abstract forms, which changed when she veered towards stand-alone sculptures of human figures. In these works, she examined the human condition in history through a series of anonymous figures that remained faceless and genderless. The interchangeable nature of those figures, representing both everyman and nobody, points towards the common conditioning of contemporary individuals, shaped by the same historical age and conditions of existence. From the beginning of the ‘80s, Magdalena Abakanowicz started to work with more traditional materials such as iron, wood and bronze. The Head is a stand-alone bronze work where loneliness and alienation are in focus. Together with the material, the shape creates a sense of closure, a lack of openness in any direction, be it outwards or inwards. It is this firm situatedness that makes this head’s silence loud.