Compelling and highly emotional, Standing Figure (1986) belongs to the celebrated body of works by Magdalena Abakanowicz, one of the most critically acclaimed European female sculptors. Although initially trained in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, throughout her career Abakanowicz chose to work across different media often creating works entirely from fabrics in order to challenge the perception of working in textiles as women’s craft, and to avoid Soviet censorship, which dictated a government-approved style of socialist realism to painters, sculptors, and architects. In the 1970s Abakanowicz began to form figures by dipping burlap and string intro resin, which she pressed into plaster moulds. The moulds were then used to create bronze figures, which as exemplified by the present Standing Figure, continue to convey the intricately fragile details of the material, imitating skin.

Abakanowicz is best known for her headless, rigidly posed figures which have been widely regarded as the artist’s personal response to totalitarianism. Beautiful and unsettling, the series of Standing Figures is largely drawn from the artist’s personal experience of World War II during which she volunteered at a hospital. Highlighting the fragile nature of the human condition, the present work was based on a male model created from jute around 1983 with first casts from the series made in bronze in 1986. The figures lack faces, an omission which the artist uses to convey the apparent uniformity of her Standing Figures. However, each sculpture, although seemingly identical to the other figures in the series, remains entirely unique with detailed surfaces distinguishing each character thus asserting that each person remains a unique being with their own voice even under a totalitarian regime.

Today, Abakanowicz’s works are housed in numerous international collections such as The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The artist’s highly anticipated retrospective exhibition will be held at Tate Modern in London opening in November 2022.

A Life In Art: The Mallin Collection