Magdelena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope at Tate Modern

Magdelena Abakanowicz was born in 1930 to Polish nobility. Her high birth did nothing to insulate her from the horrors wrought by the Nazis. In 1943, at just 12 years old, she witnessed a Nazi soldier shooting her mother in the shoulder, severing her arm. The artist spent most of her life working behind the Iron Curtain; her first exhibition was cancelled by communist authorities before it opened, as it was deemed not useful enough to advancing the cause. 

Now, five years after her death, her work is being shown in the Britain for the first time. Her self-mythologising “Abakans” are part sculpture, part tapestry – woven beings looming with the indifferent hulk of the natural world. They exist in a conceptual hinterland between art and craft, swarming the space in their earthy sisals and wool intertwined with other fibres such as horse hair. The muted autumnal colour palette also lends the feeling that these are things found rather than made, though made they were. Of her material, she explained: “I see fibre as the basic element constructing the organic world on our planet… It is from fibre that all living beings are built… We are fibrous structures.”

In the description, we are told the exhibition explores this transformative period of Abakanowicz’s practice when her woven forms came off the wall and into three-dimensional space. There are also some early textile works and drawings. 

The most striking piece is Abakan Red, which has been used in the promotional material for good reason. The abstract blood-crimson suspension stands out amid the otherwise muted colour palette. It could be seen as suggestion of female anatomy, but with the clitoris asserting itself into space rather than just sitting back and waiting (sometimes in vain) to be found – or it could be seen as something less literal, more other worldly, looking as it does like something created for a sci-fi film that was never made.

The exhibition invokes the dreaming, primal feeling of an ancient forest and some of the cylindrical pieces reference the safety and protection of trees.

The sheer scale of the work shows the ambition and work ethic of the artist. The Abakans would have taken prolonged and sustained effort and, in a world that was openly hostile to them, they are testament to a unique drive and vision.

Jessica Wall

Magdelena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope is at Tate Modern from 17^th November until 21^st May 2023. For further information visit the exhibition’s website here.