Magdalena Abakanowicz

Abakanowicz was born in Poland in 1930. While she was a student at the fine arts academies in Gdansk and Warsaw (1949-54), the focus of her artistic expression was painting, though she eventually turned to sculpture. This development was undoubtedly forecasted by the forms and environments Abakanowicz made out of clay, stone, twigs, and broken china as a child on her mother's country estate. Later, when she was confronted by the dire economic conditions of communist Poland, this gift of transforming natural and found materials into sculptural works of great monumentality and expressiveness would become a hallmark of her work.

Abakanowicz first gained international attention during the 1960s and 1970s, when she created the large relief weavings that culminated in the series "Abakans." In the mid-1970s her work took a dramatic turn, as she began to create the heads, figures, animals, and birds--made of sisal, burlap, glue, and resin formed over plaster casts--that have characterized her oeuvre ever since. Abakanowicz first cast her work in 1983 using aluminum and made her first work in bronze the following year. After the artist creates a prototype in a material such as Styrofoam, the forms are cut, cast in sections, welded, and melded, and the surfaces are finished by hand, either by Abakanowicz or under her supervision.