Iwona Dorota Bigos about Magdalena Abakanowicz

Breathlessness
‘Dear Madam, On behalf of Professor Magdalena Abakanowicz, thank you very much for your letter and your interest in her work. 
Unfortunately, her schedule of classes and trips abroad is so tight that she will not be able to meet you.’
This is an excerpt from a letter written to me by Magdalena Grabowska on October 2, 1997, in response to my request for a meeting with the artist. I was collecting material for my master’s thesis entitled Das künstlerische Werk von Magdalena Abakanowicz als Beispiel für die polnische bildenede Kunst der Gegenwart und deren Weg zur Anerkennung in der Welt-Kunst-Szene / Magdalena Abakanowicz and her work as an example of the recognition of Polish contemporary art in the world between the 1960s and the 1990s. I was finishing my studies at the University of Bremen at the time. I had obtained Magdalena Abakanowicz’s address in a letter dated 19 of August of the same year from the director of the National Museum in Wrocław, Mariusz Hermansdorfer, which in turn was a response to my request to interview him. He promised to meet me in late autumn. He kept his promise and we met in his office on November 6, 1997.
Four days later, despite Magdalena Abakanowicz’s refusal to speak to me in person, I travelled to Warsaw to make use of the artist's extensive archive. From early morning until evening, I searched for information and reviews of foreign exhibitions of her work. It was painstaking work; at the time, it was not yet possible to photocopy things or take quick photographs with a mobile phone, so I was left with making handwritten notes. Engrossed in it, I did not notice that it had become dark and the artist’s co-workers had finished their work. At one point, I heard some footsteps on the stairs. The archive was located, as it is now, upstairs from the artist’s studio. Entered Magdalena Abakanowicz saying, ‘You haven’t eaten anything. Come over to my place, I’ll heat up some soup for you.’ I don’t remember the taste of that soup, but I perfectly remember the impression our kitchen conversation left on me. I still have my notes from that meeting. The whole situation was very special and left in me, still present, the impression of having met a very wise person, strong yet also sensitive.
Our conversation did not last long, but it confirmed my desire to organise some time in the future an exhibition of works by this exceptional artist. The fact that I chose Abakanowicz’s artistic career as the subject of my master’s thesis was no coincidence. It stemmed from my fascination with her work that arose in the 1980s. In everyone’s life, there are moments that set its course. In my case, one of such moments was a visit to the National Museum in Wrocław where, as a secondary school student, I had my first conscious encounter with her work. This particular museum has a very large collection of works by Abakanowicz, which have been shown in various constellations as part of a permanent exhibition.
What I saw on that day was the Backs. They left me breathless, the twenty-six headless negatives of the reverse of a human figure sitting on the floor. They must have had arrived in Wrocław shortly before, just a couple of years after they were exhibited at the 1980 Venice Biennale. Abakanowicz was already a renowned artist and her abstract, mysterious Abakans had won her first significant international awards and opened up opportunities for extensive travel. She was already represented by galleries in Switzerland and USA. It was then, at the end of the seventies, that Mariusz Hermansdorfer met her for the first time. His conscious and selective collecting activity would later lead to the creation of the largest collection of the eminent artist’s works, located precisely in Wrocław. It was he who in 1986 purchased her two very important works presented in the Polish Pavilion in Venice: Embryology (1978-1988), consisting of over a hundred elements, and those twenty-six figures from the captivating series Backs (1976-1980), an encounter with which would impact me so profoundly.
Back then, though, in the late 1980s, I did not yet know that ten years later the artist would heat up a soup for me, that I would devote my master’s thesis to her or immerse myself in the world of contemporary art. And that many years later I would fulfil my spontaneous ‘kitchen’ desire and, together with Barbara Banaś, prepare a huge exhibition with the telling title Abakanowicz. Total presenting all of her more than fifty multi-piece works, consisting of four hundred objects, in the space of the Four Domes Pavilion, now housing the Museum of Contemporary Art, a branch of the National Museum in Wrocław, of which I have been the manager since 2018.
I have been involved with art for many years, watching it, studying it, breathing it, virtually every day. I am often moved by the work of contemporary artists, sometimes very much so, but such moments of ‘breathlessness’ are extremely rare.
 
Iwona Dorota Bigos
art historian, curator
Manager of the Four Domes Pavilion
National Museum, Wrocław