Recent Exhibitions
SOLO SHOWS
Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope
TATE Modern | London, UK
November 17, 2022 – May 21, 2023
This exhibition presents a rare opportunity to explore Abakanowicz’s series of radical woven sculptures that pioneered a new form of installation art. Many of the most significant Abakans will be brought together in a forest-like display in the 64-metre-long gallery space of the Blavatnik Building at Tate Modern. A selection of early textile pieces and her little-known drawings are also on show. The exhibition explores this transformative period of Abakanowicz’s practice when her woven forms came off the wall and into three-dimensional space.
© Tate (Jorge Colombo)
Magdalena Abakanowicz: Textile Territories
Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts | Lausanne, Switzerland
June 23, 2023 – September 24, 2023
Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope
Henie Onstad Kunstsenter | Oslo, Norway
October 27, 2023 – February 25, 2024
Alexander McQueen – Anatomy II: Spring/Summer 2024 Show
Le Carreau du Temple | Paris, France
September 30, 2023
A temporary exhibition of various Abakans filled the space for McQueen’s 2024 Spring/Summer runway show—the final collection by Creative Director Sarah Burton. Many of the garments in the collection were directly inspired by Abakanowicz’s artworks. See a gallery of the Abkans in the runway space here, images of the collection here, and view the show's video here.
Magdalena Abakanowicz - Fantasmagorie / Magdalena Abakanowicz - Phantasmagoria
Ursynowskie Centrum Kultury Alternatywy | Warsaw, Poland
October 19 - November 17, 2024
The exhibition takes up the thread of Magdalena Abakanowicz's imaginations, in which the sculptor connects the human world with animal kingdom. As a result, imaginary creatures, mutants are created, located somewhere between the animal and human world we know. It is an attempt to create a habitat in which different species coexist in mutual harmony, regardless of how different they are and how different, often fantastic worlds they come from.
GROUP SHOWS
Nowe pokolenie i klasycy z Kolekcji Wojciecha Fibaka
Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej | Toruń, Poland
June 28 - December 06, 2024
This is the first presentation of the new face of one of the oldest and most important private collections of contemporary art in Poland. It is no exaggeration to say that the dynamic development of the art market in our country was initiated by Wojciech Fibak and his École de Paris collection, shown in several museums and galleries since the end of the 1990s. Today, outstanding collectors admit that they began their adventure with art inspired by the achievements of Wojciech Fibak.
On the surface of 2,000 m2 on the first and second floors of the CSW, over 200 outstanding paintings and sculptures by classical artists and representatives of the New Generation of Polish art are presented.
Zapowiedź: Kolekcja MSN-u / Preview: The MSN Warsaw Collection
Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej | Warsaw, Poland
October 25 - November 10, 2024
There are nine works of art now on display in the MSN Warsaw building. This is an invitation to get to know and experience the new building, its proportions, and the role light plays in architecture. During the opening, we are presenting the works of women artists, both pioneers of the past and those working today. They all take an original and innovative approach to classic media of painting and sculpture. Each in her own way tells a story of independence, solidarity, and the emancipatory power of art. The artists whose works are currently shown on the ground floor and upper two levels of the museum are Magdalena Abakanowicz, Karolina Jabłońska, Zhanna Kadyrova, Kateryna Lysovenko, Sandra Mujinga, Mariela Scafati, Monika Sosnowska, Alina Szapocznikow and Cecilia Vicuña.
DUST TO DUST: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Phoebe Cummings, Robert Mapplethorpe
Sid Motion Gallery | London
Septemer 21 - November 2, 2024
In collaboration with Tom Cole, the gallery is delighted to announce DUST TO DUST, a three person exhibition featuring Magdalena Abakanowicz, Phoebe Cummings and Robert Mapplethorpe that considers the relationship between the organic world and the condition of the human body. The exhibition will centre on Robert Mapplethorpe’s flower photographs; an installation by Phoebe Cummings made from raw clay; and Magdalena Abakanowicz’s signature sisal works. All three artists engage directly with the seemingly decorative tradition of flowers to ask much deeper and profound questions of our place in the world, and the fragility, tenderness and transience of life.
Zachęta—Narodowa Galeria Sztuki | Warsaw, Poland
June 08 – September 15, 2024
Who are exhibitions made for? Whose stories do they tell, who do they leave unrepresented, and who feels out of place in an art gallery space? What social needs should a cultural institution address today?
Dozens of artworks from the last few decades, including pieces that are crucial to Polish art history as well as those linked to ground-breaking events in Zachęta’s history, form a narrative about the emotions they once evoked and continue to evoke today. Some of them provoked disgust, outrage or even scandal because they touched on taboo subjects such as illness, old age, animal cruelty or disability. We wondered how these works would be received today and whether they could even be made in the current climate. Meanwhile, the question arises: what social issues are we, as a society and as a cultural institution, still unable to confront, and what problems or social groups do we still turn our backs on?
Daj mi wszystko
Galeria Bunkier Sztuki | Cracow, Poland
March 1 - September 1, 2024
In the fall of 2023, Teresa and Andrzej Starmach donated to two Krakow institutions a significant part of their art collection. Their gift to MOCAK and MuFo, and in fact to Krakow, is one of the most spectacular transfers of art from the private sphere to the public sphere. The location of the exhibition is not accidental. The exhibition at the modernized headquarters of Bunkier Sztuki will honor the almost 60-year history of the gallery, which is one of the most important Polish institutions presenting contemporary art, and will inaugurate the return of exhibition activities.
SOFT POWER
DAS MINSK Kunsthaus | Potsdam, Germany
March 16 - August 11, 2024
The group exhibition Soft Power positions textile design as an artistic means of expression that can be employed to question power relations. The exhibition addresses various aspects of textile art in three chapters. The first chapter, “Invisible Hands,” focuses on the production conditions of textiles and their raw materials, including the history of the Leipzig-Lindenau cotton mill and VEB Vowetex in Plauen, among other examples. “Disrupting Patterns”—the second chapter—explores how textile patterns are often based on the repetition of graphic structures, which typically originate from long traditions and can convey information about power hierarchies or status. The works presented in this chapter of the exhibition question existing patterns and relationships. Finally, “Ancestral Threads” traces the lines that connect us to the past. Just as individual threads can combine to form fabrics and larger networks, the historical and contemporary works in this chapter refer to past traditions that continue to have an effect today.
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art
Barbican Centre | London, UK
February 14 - May 26, 2024
Bringing together over 100 artworks by a diverse range of international practitioners to examine the ways in which artists have embraced textiles to explore the transformative and subversive potential of textiles to challenge power structures and reimagine the world. Spanning intimate hand-crafted works to large-scale sculptural installations, the exhibition presents radical works in their form and politics, revealing how textiles have been forces of resistance and repair. The exhibition will travel to Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam where will be open for the public since September 14, 2024 until January 5, 2025. Press about the exhibition: link to The Guardian, Link to The Times, link to The Standard, link to The Telegraph
Polska spår
Södertälje Konsthall | Södertälje, Sweden
March 23-May 25, 2024
As a tribute and reminder of the lively cultural exchange between Sweden and Poland in the second half of the 20th century, the exhibition Polska spår (Polish traces) presents the history of this long-standing cooperation. The exhibition also includes works by artists working in Sweden, who drew inspiration both from the history of art and culture of Poland in general and from the works of exhibited artists in particular. Both Jan Håfström and the late Torsten Renqvist were interested in Hasior's art. However, Anna Kellerth and Éva Mag are fascinated by Abakanowicz's monumental sculptures. Moreover, to show the continuity of artistic exchange between generations, works by the Polish artistic duo: Józef Gałązka and Natan Kryszek were shown, which were created in dialogue with Hasior's work.
Widzenie ciałem. Kolekcja Galerii Studio
Seeing with the Body. Galeria Studio Collection
Galeria Studio | Warsaw, Poland
March 15-May 5, 2024
“Seeing with the Body” is inspired by currents of philosophy and aesthetics that are critical of the Anthropocene. It derives from the intuition that artists have long been interested in those regions of sensibility that are today described in the context of posthumanism. Exhibition presents in a new light works by such classics of modern art in Poland as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Erna Rosenstein, Konrad Jarodzki or Teresa Pągowska. We also recall the art of the neo-avant-garde by Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Józef Robakowski, Ewa Partum, Krystyna Piotrowska, Natalia LL. And we feature figurative art of the 70s and 80s in Poland, highlighting themes of body and sensuality in the work of Jan Dobkowski, Jerzy Ryszard Zieliński “Jurry,” Barbara Falender. We recall works by international artists, such as Andy Warhol or Keith Haring. And finally, we include works by artists of the younger generation, including Agnieszka Grodzińska, Agata Bogacka, Renata (Rara) Kamińska, Zuzanna Hertzberg and Alicja Bielawska.
Matrices
Yossi Milo | New York
February 8 - March 9, 2024
Matrices showcases the work of four women artists, positing an intergenerational conversation on notions of abstraction, modularity, structure, and pattern. Through their unconventional approaches to materiality, especially in relation to traditions of painting as a historically male-dominated field, the artists create and challenge repetitive structures — both in the innovative nature of their pursuits and in rethinking preconceptions of practice, craft, and form. The artists included in the show uphold and subvert a continual grid, through regimented and formal experiments in painting, and in the alternating threads of woven fabric. In doing so, they form a vanguard of women artists who are formally innovative, as well as historically prescient in their times.
Bizantyjska nostalgia / Byzantine Nostalgia
Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski | Warsaw, Poland
January 26-April 7, 2024
“Byzantine nostalgia” is how Tadeusz Kantor poetically described the intention behind the work of Jerzy Nowosielski, whose birth centenary we recently celebrated. His painting, fascinating with the strange coexistence of two aspects – the sacred and the profane, spirituality and corporeality, mysticism and rationality, the desire for the absolute and intense erotic experiences – became the starting point of the research that led to the making of this exhibition. The need to “look behind the scenes” has remained powerful – like a basic instinct that drives art. We feel compelled to ask ourselves what or who is behind the image. If God was there once, who is there now? Emptiness? The Big Nothing, as Kazimir Malevich claimed? The main pursuit of the avant-garde was not, as is commonly believed, formal experiments, but the search for a “higher reality”, the true one. Behind the start of the avant-garde movements – from suprematism to surrealism – lay the belief in the priority of the extrasensory world over the material one. With its idea of the “tautological object”, mid-20th century modernism – from abstract expressionism to minimalism – abolished the concept of the image. It has come to the point that a work of art does not reflect anything, but simply exists.
Nowoczesność reglamentowana: Modernizm w PRL
Rationed Modernity: Modernism in the People’s Republic of Poland
Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie | Cracow, Poland
November 17, 2023 - April 14, 2024
Rationed Modernity focuses on the determinants and limitations of modernisation processes in Poland after World War II. The exhibition abstracts from the widespread myth equating the functioning of modern art in the Polish People’s Republic with the fight for the spiritual and political freedom of the individual. Submitting to this myth cuts off historical contingencies and simplifies the complex connections between modernisation and artistic creativity. The exhibition highlights this tension between modernist visual languages and the war experience to illustrate the ideological effects of the modernist imperative for art’s social function. Through this exploration of the shape and fate of art in and after the interwar period, modernism’s phantom nature and Poland’s dependence on adopted modernisation patterns stand in contrast with the deformations of modernist projects characterising everyday life in the times of the Polish People’s Republic.
HARD/SOFT: Textil und Keramik in der zeitgenössischen Kunst
HARD/SOFT: Textiles and Ceramics in Contemporary Art
MAK-Museum für angewandte Kunst/Museum of Applied Arts | Vienna, Austria
December 13, 2023 - April 28, 2024
The intermedial potential of textiles and ceramics connects material, aesthetics, and society against the backdrop of the avant-garde. Textiles and ceramics mediate themselves as cultural carriers of communities and are inscribed in economic and political systems that lead to revolutions. In this exhibition, questions of appropriation, feminist, and queer contexts meet with a dynamic in which different narratives are mirrored in each other.
Wspólny splot. Początki polskiej szkoły tkaniny
The Common Weave. Beginnings of the Polish school of Textile Art
Fundacja Arton | Warsaw, Poland
December 10, 2023 - February 29, 2024
The phenomenon referred to as the "Polish School of Textile Art," which manifested itself through a group of mostly women artists in the 1960s, had its origins much earlier. The founding moment is considered to be the 1st International Biennale of Textiles in Lausanne (1962) where the international press lauded the Polish exhibition’s character as a downright revolutionary manifestation. However, the process of its formation was long, complex, and connected with the environment of the Warsaw School of Fine Arts followed by the local Academy of Fine Arts. The co-creators of this trend who participated in the most important international exhibitions of textiles include Magdalena Abakanowicz, Jolanta Owidzka, Ada Kierzkowska, and Wojciech Sadley. These artists had spectacular successes and a common history with the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and prominent pedagogies after the interwar period, most notably Eleonora Plutyńska, Anna Śledziewska, and Mieczysław Szymański.
FÄDEN: Material – Mythen – Symbole THREADS: Material – Myths – Symbols
Draiflessen Collection | Mettingen, Germany
October 15, 2023 - February 25, 2024
Who does not know the thread of life, the golden thread? Who is not interwoven with others? THREADS thus brings together works by contemporary women artists, along with exemplary spinning utensils, and graphics with motifs from select Greco-Roman myths. These works, deliberately gathered from different contexts and categories, are “interlaced” in such a way that they offer visitors—to continue this train of thought—numerous connecting threads, enabling them to engage with the use and meaning of thread as a symbol of personal and social narratives. Conceptual and associative spaces open up between the poles of fate and responsibility, trust and skepticism, individuality and collectivity, and power and powerlessness. Thus, the exhibition bridges from antiquity through the possible tomorrow to thematically explore the symbolic meanings of thread for people and human life.