Magdalena Abakanowicz
In 1970, Magdalena Abakanowicz was commissioned to realize Bois le Duc, a massive sculpture installed in the entrance hall of the Brabant Province government building. To this day, it remains the largest of her three-dimensional fiber sculptures, part of a series she termed “Abakans.” The heaviness of the work’s textile materials—an abstract tapestry of alternating smooth and rough surfaces, here in earth tones—is typical of this series, which was highly influential at the time, blurring the boundary between high art and craft or, as the artist said herself, seeking the “total obliteration of the utilitarian function of tapestry.” It acts as the starting point for this posthumous celebration of a practice that spanned over fifty years, presented in three venues around the city of Den Bosch.
At Het Noordbrabants Museum, her body of work is divided into sections including “Power and Protest” and “The Human Condition,” each representing key aspects of the artist’s evolution. Upon entering the first and largest gallery, titled “Environment,” one encounters Abakan Red, 1969, one of the most visually impactful works in the show. Extending down from the ceiling as a large, bright-red woven form with multiple protruding appendages, the sculpture is accentuated by the lighting, making its size, startling color, and unique shape appear as if it had been produced yesterday.
Around the same time Abakanowicz was gaining international recognition, she attended a 1971 meeting of the Club of Rome, a major conference that shed an early light on the global crisis that is climate change. This would have a lasting effect on her thinking, causing her subsequent work to take on an increasingly figurative form and a more human scale, enabled by using a different set of materials. Here, Crowd III, 1988–89, is a captivating example of this shifting approach, reminiscent of the artist’s 2006 public commission Agora, in Chicago’s Grant Park. Like in Chicago, these head- and armless body-shaped sculptures are brown hollowed shells; only now, rather than standing nine feet tall like cast-off iron giants in an open field, the figures are made from resin and jute and lined up in multiple rows facing the visitor. As if to remind us that there’s strength in numbers, standing side by side.
