View all Class in the spotlight ArticlesSubscribe to the Class in the spotlight RSS Feed View all This Week ArtcilesSubscribe to This Week RSS Feed View all The Arts ArticlesSubscribe to The Arts RSS Feed View all Class in the Spotlight ArticlesSubscribe to Class in the Spotlight RSS Feed View all Sports Features ArticlesSubscribe to the Sports Features RSS Feed View all Professor of the Week ArticlesSubscribe to the Professor of the Week RSS Feed
the campous chronicle features footer
The Campus Chronicle Artifact Header
Poetter Hall was purchased by the SCAD founders in March 1979. Classes began in September of that year.  
The Campus Chronicle Artifact Footer

The Arts

Sculptor confronts ‘solitude in the multitudes’

Magdalena Abakanowicz

“Uccello 1, 4 and 6” by Magdalena Abakanowicz are on display at Pei Ling Chan Gallery and Garden for the Arts through April 13.

By Hannah Pittard
Published: Friday, February 20, 2004

Leave it to world-renowned sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz to be so bold as to title her exhibition “Mutation and Crystallization” — a paradox suggesting both impermanence and intransigence.

“The story of my art to date shows the creation of my own universum through surges of growth, mutation and crystallization,” she said. “The scale is large, the vision appropriate to nothing less than analyses of man’s creativity and nature’s wisdom.”

If Abakanowicz’s words ring of complexity and grandiosity, it might be because she has 45 years of experience as an artist to back them up. “The quality of my art combines the metaphoric and the real, the soft and the intractable.”

Abakanowicz was 9 years old when World War II began, and her work has been undoubtedly affected by a childhood surrounded by violence. “People were killing people around me,” she said. “Around me marches and parades celebrated leaders who were mass murderers. As the years went by, other versions of this vision appeared. Hitler and Stalin were followed by Pol Pot, Milosevic, by others who create theories and philosophies justifying invasions, destruction and the killing of millions.”

In war, Abakanowicz recognized man’s willingness to lose his individuality by disappearing into a crowd. “Crowds obey leaders. Masses act like brainless organisms. They are easy to manipulate,” she said. Hoping to “confront man with himself, with his solitude in the multitudes,” the sculptor began casting human bodies in burlap in the 1970s to finish in bronze or iron. “I wanted to bewitch quantity by creating quantity.”

According to Abakanowicz, her work was neither easily nor immediately understood. “First came the group of 18 ‘Seated Figures’ and 80 ‘Backs.’ They were so new to the world of sculpture that acceptance did not come immediately. I was asked, ‘Are these editions? Why so many?’ I replied, ‘They are not editions. They are singles, individualities like we are, similar in general shape, but different in their details.’ These groups are not meant to decorate a garden or a living room. They are a statement about us, about our reality.” Ultimately, “Backs” found a home at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, and “Seated Figures” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Slowly but steadily, Abakanowicz’s burlap figures joined collections in America, Japan, Korea, Australia, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. Her largest group of 112 walking figures titled “Unrecognized” stands as a permanent installation in Poznan, Poland.

Eventually incorporating wax and aluminum, Abakanowicz’s sculptures have continued to change without ever losing that early fascination with the nature of a herd. “Analyzing my feelings, I could say: I immerse in the crowd like a grain of sand in the friable sands,” she said. “I fade among the anonymity of glances, movements, smells, in the common absorption of air, in the common pulsation of juices under the skin. I become a cell of this boundless organism of the crowd, like others already integrated and deprived of expression.”

“Mutation and Cystallization” is on display through April 13 at Pei Ling Chan Gallery and Garden for the Arts, 322 and 324 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Receptions will be held March 5 and April 2, 5-7 p.m. “Wildflowers,” several ink and charcoal drawings by Abakanowicz, will be shown at Pinnacle Gallery, 320 E. Liberty St., March 3-30 in conjunction with “Mutation and Crystallization.”