Magdalena Abakanowicz
| Magdalena Abakanowicz | |
|---|---|
|
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| Born |
June 20, 1930 Falenty, Poland |
| Nationality | Polish |
| Education | Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts |
| Known for | sculpture, fiber art |
| Awards | Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts (1999) |
Magdalena Abakanowicz (born June 20, 1930, in Falenty, Poland) is a Polish sculptor and fiber artist. She is notable for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium. She was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland from 1965 to 1990 and a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles in 1984. Abakanowicz currently lives and works in Warsaw.
Magdalena Abakanowicz was born to a noble landowner family. Her mother descended from old Polish nobility. Her father came from a Polonized Tatar family, which traced its origins to Abaqa Khan, the 13th century Mongol chieftain. He fled Russia to newly independent Poland after the October Revolution. The Russian invasion of 1920 forced her family to flee their home, after which they moved to the city of Gdańsk. When she was nine Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Poland. Her family endured the war years living on the outskirts of Warsaw.
After the war and resulting Soviet occupation, the family moved to the small city of Tczew near Gdańsk, in northern Poland, where they hoped to start a new life. Under Soviet control, the Polish government officially adopted Socialist realism as the only acceptable art form which should be pursued by artists. Originally conceived by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, Socialist realism, in nature, had to be 'national in form' and 'socialist in content'. Other art forms being practiced at the time in the West, such as Modernism, were culturally outlawed and heavily censored in all Eastern bloc nations, including Poland.
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