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ART+AUCTION MARCH 2016 (^) | BLOUINARTINFO.COM
Abakanowicz is considered to be
one of Poland’s most famous artists. She
started out making fiber sculptures
in the form of large-scale tapestries and
weavings, working off the loom so as
not to be confined to two-dimensional
or grid-based structures. Wheel
with Rope, 1973, is also an earlier piece,
but is a bit different from many of
her other works of this period. It’s a
MAGDALENA
ABAKANOWICZ
really large-scale sculpture that has a
relationship to industry and textiles.
She acquired the materials by dredging
rope from the harbor in Warsaw after
the war, because there was a real poverty
of access to art supplies. Later, living
under Communism, she was shut out from
getting any materials or having a studio
space, so part of her choice to work
with textiles was that they could be folded
up and stored in very small places. After
dredging the rope she would unwind
and reuse it, which creates a found qual-
ity in a lot of the textiles she uses. The
heavy industrial material of Wheel with
Rope becomes a nice counter balance
to the minimal work that was happening
a decade earlier in that it is unwound:
it’s loose, it’s large, and it is made by a
woman. —JS