Magdalena Abakanowicz. Bambini

The installation by the renowned sculptor can be seen from 6 November at the branch of the National Museum in Gdańsk, Zielona Brama. Bambini is a spatial composition of 83 sculptures – headless and armless figures made of concrete and wood. It has been exhibited in New York, Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Warsaw, among other cities.

In May, the Senate of the Republic of Poland proclaimed 2027 the Year of Magdalena Abakanowicz. The National Museum in Gdańsk is anticipating its celebrations as early as the last quarter of the previous year.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, one of the most celebrated Polish artists in the world, studied at the State Secondary School of Fine Arts in Gdynia, began studies at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 1949, and a year later transferred to the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her international fame came with her participation in the International Biennale of Tapestry in Lausanne in 1962, with the three-dimensional installation Kompozycja białych form. For this work, groundbreaking both in the art of tapestry and in sculpture, she received a gold medal at the São Paulo Biennale in 1965. Her monumental, spatial forms made of wool, linen, thread and dyed sisal fibre were named abakans after the artist's surname.

Spaces of Experience

From the mid-1970s, monumental humanoid sculptures began to play an increasingly important role in her work. At that time she created, among others, Alteracje – twelve hollowed-out figures seated in a row, Głowy – large forms resembling human heads without faces, and Plecy and Postacie siedzące, depicting human torsos. The motif of the anonymous human being shown as part of a larger collective became one of the most important themes of her work.

Between 1986 and 2008, groups of standing figures were created: Tłum I, Tłum II, Tłum III, Mędrcy, Hurma, Bambini and Odwróceni. In these works the artist addressed the relationship between the individual and the collective, anonymity, and the experience of human existence. From the early 1980s she also realised monumental outdoor projects, which she called “spaces of experience”. They were created mainly outside Poland. The most important include Sarkofagi w szklanych domach in France – four forms of wood and metal resembling sarcophagi enclosed in glazed structures; Katarsis near Florence – a group of 33 impersonal figures cast in bronze, about three metres tall; Negev at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem – seven stone circles, 280 centimetres in diameter; Przestrzeń smoka in Seoul, consisting of ten monumental animal heads; and Przestrzeń umilkłych istnień in Hiroshima, composed of 40 bronze figures of larger-than-life size from the Plecy cycle.

The individual is fragile, the crowd is powerful

“Bambini” consists of 83 sculptures made of concrete and wood. They are headless and armless figures the size of a child.

– This is one of the largest realisations in Abakanowicz's oeuvre and the only one that depicts children. She said she was not interested in the portrait of a specific person, yet she treated each of these spatial, hollow figures, which she called shells of the human body, individually, giving each its own character. In her hands, concrete became an exceptionally plastic material – fragile, with a texture full of cracks and scratches, almost organic – says Małgorzata Ruszkowska, the curator of the exhibition. – She was interested in the tension between the individual and the collective.

The title Bambini, that is, children figures arranged in irregular rows, evokes the school pressure of solemn assemblies, the shaping of young minds to fit social structures from the earliest years. They dehumanise through the collective experience of generations following one another. They strip the emerging childhood experiences and the imagination awakening within them of individuality. In Tłumy, Abakanowicz confronts us with the experience of adulthood and of functioning within established social structures. Placing figures in such a situation…