Magdalena Abakanowicz: Crowd and Individual

Magdalena Abakanowicz (b. Falenty, 1930) is a Polish sculptor who often uses textile as her principal artistic medium.One of her Crowd series, a theme that she has addressed many times in the course of her long career, the giant installation of 110 burlap figures will be given its first showing in Venice at the Fondazione Cini.

“Maybe the experience of the crowd, which waits passively in line, but is ready to trample, destroy, or adore on command, like a headless creature, has become the focus of my research. What may also have attracted me to the theme was my fascination with the scale of the human body, or a desire to determine how little is needed to express the whole.” This is how Magdalena Abakanowicz has described her interest in the theme of crowds, a subject that constitutes the most important part of her oeuvre. She has made several Crowds, which vary in the number of figures and the way they are depicted: standing, walking, or sitting. Made of textiles or at times also of other materials, each sculpture is unique and was produced by Abakanowicz in various stages of her artistic career.