BWA Gallery has presented the following series of sculptures: „Sitting figures”, „Backs”, „Pacing figures”, „Running figures”, „Plower”, „Figures with heads”, „Dancing figures”, „Wagon”, „Vehicle”, „Figure with open arms”, „30 Turned”, and also posters from various exhibitions. The works date back to the years 1974 2002.
Each subsequent exposition of Abakanowicz works is a new, mutual confrontation, it is also a new kind of dialogue that is born between her art and the recipients of the work a new space of experiences”. Regardless of the subject matter, the main interest of this art is man his separate character and his indistinguishableness from the crowd. The crowd becomes the symbol of our times, on one hand subject to manipulation, on the other dangerous and aggressive. The artist has been interested in this crowd for a long time. A nameless mob, rabble, bulk, swarm in the works of Magdalena Abakanowicz it becomes a new category of existence the impersonal existence which is born where counting is no longer justified. Figures present in this crowd are marked individually in a discrete way. The external tissue of their bodies is sometimes smooth and soft, but sometimes rumpled and coarse like bark of an old tree. It happens to be stigmatised with an additional crack, or wrinkled, like faces of hard-experienced people. A man comprised within the crowd, deprived of his inner life, lasts here in a frozen pose of anticipation. Then he moves in a somnambulists dance, as if pushed by some invisible force, whose roots should be sought at the dawn of human race. He attracts others, making a chain of headless homo ludens. However, this is not a dance of joy, but an expression of certain attitude towards life typical of man residing in his nature, atavistic need of herd celebration, against all odds. It is a kind of “memento” for the living, silent in scream, reminding of inevitable death. Man in the art of Magdalena Abakanowicz, in his physical existence, is directed towards annihilation he changes, is subject to destruction, to be finally reunited with the tissue of the earth from which he was created. But the empty interiors of human bodies have also their extramaterial dimension they become a vessel for all things spiritual, for that which cannot be sensually penetrated and rationally ordered. Hence, physical emptiness is not an emptiness of lack here, but a reality full of essential, existential meanings.
The exhibition curator Henryk Gac

Exhibition: 2003.04.12 – 2003.05.28