Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Magdalena Abakanowicz @ The Margulies Collection Revisited

This past January was my second time to visit The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Miami.  Magdalena Abakanowicz's sculptures are hauntingly beautiful themselves.  Her accompanying text sends shivers up my spine.

Hurma (Crowd), 1994 - 1995
Group of 250 figures (children and adults)
Burlap and resin

Magdalena Abakanowicz
About Hurma (Crowd)
It happend to me to live in times, which were extraordinary by their various forms of collective hate and collective adulation.  Marches and parade worshipped leaders, great and good who soon turned out to be mass murderers.  I was obsessed by the image of the crowd, manipulated like a brainless organism and acting like a brainless organism.  I suspected that under the human skull, instincts and emotions overpower the intellect without us being aware of it.

It was my ambition to speak in metamorphic language of my sculpture, about my experiences.  I wanted to warn, to provoke thinking to show to people all over the world the existential fears common to all of us, the doubts about ourselves, that we all suffer and the fears of crowds carrying the instinct of destruction of themselves and the surrounds.
Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1992

This text was also posted on the wall to accompany the text above:

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the post! This artist is amazing... I found great pictures of Magdalena Abakanowicz in Art Days, here is the link! http://www.art-days.com/magdalena-abakanowicz/ Enjoy! :)

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