Textile titan Magdalena Abakanowicz broke the rules and defied categorisation

Magdalena Abakanowicz is an artist who consistently defied categorisation. Having exploded the boundaries of fibre art by liberating weaving from the traditions of wall-based work and exploring the potential of textiles in immersive installations, she radically reimagined what yarn can do.

Abakanowicz’s childhood experiences are what set her against authoritarianism and convention. Under the Nazi occupation of Poland, her aristocratic family was forced to flee its estates and, in 1939 at the age of nine, she witnessed her mother’s arm being severed by the gunshots of a drunken German soldier. She later went to art schools in Gdynia and Sopot, but faced challenges to her progress under the Communist regime.

Aged 20, Abakanowicz could only enter the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw by pretending to be the daughter of a humble clerk. In order to resist the enforced aesthetics and subject matter of Socialist Realism, which was imposed on painting and sculpture by the post-war Soviet regime, taking up weaving gave her a way to express herself freely. Helped by tutors and mentors who were reinvigorating the Polish weaving tradition, Abakanowicz honed her skills and ideas, also finding inspiration from creatives who were spearheading revolutionary culture, such as painter and theatre director Tadeusz Kantor.

She eventually evolved her work from sensual abstract weavings hung from the ceiling, to floor-based ‘spatial experiences’ (her terminology before the word ‘installation’ became commonplace). In Edinburgh in 1972, she threaded huge sisal ropes out of a gallery window to connect to the city’s cathedral across the street, and exhibited further experiments with rope the following year at the Whitechapel in London and the Arnolfini in Bristol (featured in Crafts in 1973). The citation for the honorary doctorate she received from the Royal College of Art that year said she ‘traversed all categories in art’. In a letter to one of her students, Abakanowicz discussed what she dubbed ‘the intellectual disorder of our existence’: an allusion to the human tension between despair and hope, repression and freedom that underscores her work.

Addressing the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź in 1998, Abakanowicz emphasised the distinctly Polish origins of her oeuvre as: ‘The expression of art saturated with history, deformed by modernity, diverging from the direction of art in the free world. Perhaps the experience of the crowd, waiting passively in line, but ready to trample, destroy or adore on command like a headless creature, became the core of my analysis.’

In fulfilment of this idea, she further reoriented her work, substituting textile for cast iron or bronze-cast figurative environments, such as Agora (Chicago, 2006) and Unrecognised (Poznan, 2002) – dystopian crowds of more than 100 headless torsos, both permanently installed outdoors.

But it is her textile art that takes centre stage in Tate Modern’s show. Its curator, Ann Coxon, aimed for ‘a visceral, physically monumental, experiential exhibition’, with a central ‘forest of forms’ featuring up to 30 of the pieces the artist named Abakans. Each is a tapestry up to five metres high, handwoven and dyed in reds, earth brown, black or yellow, which unite the organic matter of human, animal and natural environments in a narrative at once personal and universal. Abakanowicz said of her Abakans: ‘When examining man, I am in fact examining myself [...] My forms are the skins I strip off myself one by one, marking the milestones along my road.’

Abakans were first seen at the International Biennale of Tapestry in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1967 and upended the tradition of pictorial, wall-mounted tapestries sustained by the biennale’s co-founder, Jean Lurçat. ‘The Abakans irritated,’ he recalled. ‘They were untimely. There was the French tapestry in weaving, pop art and conceptual art, and here were some complicated, huge, magical forms.’

When works by Abakanowicz are characterised as ‘irritant’, we are alerted to their inherent provocation; their methods and meanings resonate today in an era of upturned norms. As Abakanowicz said herself: ‘If I talk about problems, it’s global – everything I do is about the human condition.’

This is an edited extract from an article by Martina Margetts, first published in Crafts issue 294

'Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope' is showing at the Tate Modern in London from 17 November to 21 May 2023.