Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)

ANNUAL REPORT 2005 - A 2005. ÉV - KATA BODOR: Exhibition of Magdalena Abakanowicz

EXHIBITION OF MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ 14 July - 11 September 2005 Curator: Krisztina Jerger MÁRIUSZ 11ERMANSDORFER. ABAKANOWICZ. MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BUDAPEST 2005, FIUNGARIAN TEXT. 34 PP.. 5 COL. ILLS.. ISBN 963 7063 07 2 The Museum of Fine Arts Budapest celebrated the 75th birthday of Magdalena Abakanowicz with a jubilee show. The works of the Polish artist may have been familiar to many of the Hungarian public, for her retrospective exhibition was staged in 1988 in the Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle), Budapest; yet the generation who has grown up in the meantime has not had the possibility to see Abakanowicz's works in Hungary. The exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts did not aim to show her entire oeuvre, but rather to highlight the unmistakable features and unique characteristics of Abakanowicz's art. In the twilight space of the Doric Hall, its floor covered with sea-grass, absorbing the noise of footfall, one encountered Abakanowicz's most emblematic works (fig. 74), among them, Cage, an installation made in 1986, purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts on the occasion of the artist's retrospective in the Műcsarnok. Magdalena Abakanowicz is one of the rare Eastern European artists, who already early in her carrier broke through the borders of the Eastern Bloc, and, winning the award of the Sào Paolo Biennial in 1965, she soon earned international acclaim. Although she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw between 1950-54 and initially made traditional gouache and oil paintings, her attention was soon directed to other techniques and materials, at a time which saw the expansion of artistic genres, the rejuvenation of traditional tools and the birth of intermediality. During the era of Pop Art, conceptual art, happenings and minimal art, artists were trying out new approaches, and by way of an introspection of art itself, were searching for answers to the why's of making art. Abakanowicz joined this movement from a field that at the time was viewed as peripheral: using textiles in a way that she committed herself to the modern application of new materials and traditional textiles. The result, however, was not the reformation of classic textile art, but the establishment of a new kind of textile art. In her works, in which the material gradually emerges from