Magdalena Abakanowicz

 Sculptures

Magdalena Abakanowicz (*1930, lives and works in Warsaw) is the most renowned contemporary Polish artist. She gained international acclaim with her monumental sculptures and installations of hand-woven linen and jute-like textiles called Abakans which she first created in the early 1960s and for which sher eceived the Great Prize of the Sao Paolo Biennial in 1965. Since then, she has developed her own complex and manifold cosmos of archaic figures that inhabit the great museums of the world: gigantic tree trunks that mutate through applied metal constructions into monstrous rockets; mythical creatures, part animal, part human; groups of mostly headless human figures sitting, standing, walking or dancing which are both graceful and uncanny at the same time. To celebrate the completion of the museum’s surroundings, two of these monumental sculpture groups totalling 30 single figures altogether will be presented outside the museum. Until April 2005