Who was Magdalena Abakanowicz? Polish sculptor honoured in Google Doodle

Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz has been celebrated with a Google Doodle on what would have been her 93rd birthday.

Widely regarded as one of Poland’s most internationally acclaimed artists, Abakanowicz gained global critical acclaim for her pioneering textile sculptures of the human figure.

She was part of a generation of artists whose childhood was heavily disrupted by the outbreak of World War II.

In a blog post on Tuesday, 20 June, Google explained the design behind Abakanowicz’s Doodle, writing: “Is it a tapestry or a sculpture? Magdalena Abakanowicz’s figures of woven fibre broke the mold when she pioneered a new category of art known as Abakans.

“Today’s Doodle celebrates the Polish sculptor and multi-element artist.”

Who was Magdalena Abakanowicz?

Born in 1930 into a landowning family of aristocratic heritage whose lineage could allegedly be traced back to Genghis Khan, Abakanowicz enjoyed an early life of privilege.

However, her idyllic upbringing was uprooted at the outbreak of the Second World War. She was nine when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and her family spent years living on the outskirts of Warsaw, becoming members of the Polish resistance. In 1943, a drunken soldier shot her mother, causing her to lose her right arm.

Under the post-war communist doctrine, the Polish government officially decreed socialist realism as the only acceptable art form allowed to be created. Other forms being practiced at the time in the West, such as Modernism, were outlawed and heavily censored in all Communist Bloc nations, including Poland.

After the end of the war, in 1948, Abakanowicz began studying at the secondary school for plastic arts in Gdynia. In 1954, she graduated from Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts.

Of her time studying, she said: “I liked to draw, seeking the form by placing lines, one next to the other. The professor would come with an eraser in his hand and rub out every unnecessary line on my drawing, leaving a thin, dry contour. I hated him for it.”

Much of Abakanowicz’s early works were large gouaches painted on canvas, but she became able to experiment with other forms of media in the mid-1950s, as Poland’s government began to liberalise its attitude to the arts.

From welded steel to textiles, Abakanowicz’s art began to evolve and in 1962 she was encouraged by the weaver Maria Laszkiewicz to exhibit at the first International Tapestry Biennale in Lausanne, Switzerland.

A few years later, she began to develop her own unique style of sculpting throughout the 1960s, transforming textiles into three-dimensional sculptures suspended from the ceiling. The installations were named Abakans, after herself.

In 1965, Abakanowicz’s innovative approach was rewarded at the São Paulo International Art Biennale where her Abakans won her the top prize.

It was one of the many awards she would go on to win during her career. She also won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in New Jersey, an award for Distinction in Sculpture from the Sculpture Center in New York, and the Commander Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta in Poland.

By the mid-70s she had developed the works which would go on to become her most recognisable – severed heads and headless bodies made from sacking.

Museums and exhibitions across Europe, the Americas, Japan, and Australia have featured Abakanowicz’s work.

One of her collections called Agora, which is a group of 106 iron cast figures, enjoys permanent installation at Chicago’s Grant Park.

Abakanowicz died on 20 April, 2017 in Warsaw, Poland.