In 1979 Magdalena Abakanowicz became a professor of fine arts at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznań; in the same year she also made the relief fabric La Seur. This form of artistic expression brought her fame — in 1965, at the São Paulo Biennale, she received a prize for a series of just such fabrics. This work, although not full-space, can be called an abakan — a term that appeared on the occasion of the aforementioned Biennale and an exhibition at Zachęta in the same year, and referred precisely to spatial relief fabrics. This kind of work has been rediscovered in recent years, following the death of the artist (2017), who at one point in her artistic career cut herself off from it, turning to sculpture, considered a better (and undoubtedly more enduring) genre in the classical art hierarchy. La Seur is an intermediate form — it hangs on a wall, but through ropes and knots, it partially reaches out into space. It has little in common with the traditional decorative wall textile. It is a threatening biological form maintained in dark colours (shades of brown, black, beige, red). It resembles a large, exposed vagina, which could be read as a manifesto of feminism, were it not for the fact that the artist rather dissociated herself from it, while maintaining that all interpretations of her art are possible. The work has a primordial force in it, which can be combined with Abakanowicz’s trip ‘to the sources of energy’ (1976) — to New Guinea, Thailand, Celebes, Bali, Sumatra and Java. In 1979, at the Lausanne Biennale of Textiles, the sculptor showed three black, full-space forms entitled Pour contemplation. It is worth mentioning that Relief sombre de Stefa (1975) is maintained in a similar style to La Seur.

Karolina Zychowicz

translated by Paulina Bożek