Word: abakanowicz
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...Contemporary Art. "Wack!" which was curated by Cornelia Butler, starts with a bang. It's called Abakan Red, a coarsely woven, more or less circular bolt of red cloth. Suspended from the ceiling almost to the floor, it was made in 1969 by the great Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, an early adopter of "humble" women's crafts like weaving as high-art techniques. She also understood how abstract images could be adjusted until they hinted again at something human. So the quasi-vaginal slit that runs the length of her piece shifts it from the realm of mere geometry...
...museum has hosted some 30 shows featuring artists like Spanish sculptor Mart?n Chirino, Dutch painter Ad Snijders and Slovak painter Peter Poll?g. Coming up are "True Colors," the work of 68 U.S. artists responding to Sept. 11 (April 6 to May 23), and a retrospective of Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz (May 25 to June 17). Although no longer obsessed with Van Gogh, Polakovic honors the artist's legacy in Danubiana. "His idea with Yellow House was to create a community where artists could meet, work and show their works," he says. "Danubiana aspires to be such a place...
...founded the Museum Kampa. Located in a beautifully restored mill house on the Vltava River, the museum features a collection of 150 works by 50 artists who worked in Central Europe between the 1960s and the 1980s. Big names like Jirí Kolár and Poland's Magdalena Abakanowicz are here, but the most riveting displays are by lesser-known artists. Especially imposing is Gebauer's Correct Side of the Slaughter-House, a Grim Reaper-like figure that mimics Lenin's official portraits. Gebauer, now 62, says he enjoys the freedoms of the post-communist Czech Republic, but notes...
...full impact of what Abakanowicz can do with this primal image, one must see her sculptures at P.S. 1. These are all part of the same series, titled War Games -- 16 sculptures so far, a growing family. Each piece is a trunk, a dead tree salvaged from the dying forests of the Mazury Lakes region, 200 miles north of Warsaw. Abakanowicz works these trunks to a degree -- stripping the bark, smoothing out some excrescences with chain saw and hatchet and applying some surface treatment -- but she does not carve them beyond that. Each wrinkled bole with its splayed limbs...
...metal fittings read as shells or tusks, sometimes as prostheses and sometimes as primitive tools from a remote past haunted by medieval forest fears. This passive- aggressive imagery is strongly affecting. It also makes you realize how sharply metaphors drawn from the natural world can still affect us. Abakanowicz's art insists that the organic cannot be evaded or denied -- not, at any rate, without a cultural loss that amounts to mutilation. For through the organic, myth is repaired...