Lot 479
  • 479

Magdalena Abakanowicz

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Description

  • Magdalena Abakanowicz
  • Crowd (Standing Figures)
  • burlap and synthetic resin, in 22 parts

  • Each (appx.): 67 by 21 by 9 in. 170.2 by 53.4 by 22.9 cm.
  • Executed in 1986-1987.

Provenance

Private Collection, Switzerland
Galerie Pels-Leusden, Berlin (acquired from the above in 1989)

Exhibited

Berlin, Galerie Pels-Leusden, Magdalena Abakanowicz Skulpturen, January - April 1990, no. 4, illustrated in color

Literature

Barbara Rose, Magdalena Abakanowicz, New York, 1994, (another group illustrated on cover and pgs. 130-133)

Catalogue Note

"I feel overawed by quantity where counting no longer makes sense.  By urepeatability within such a quantity. By creatures of nature gathered in herds, droves, species, in which each individual, while subservient to the mass, retains some distinguishing features. 

A crowd of people or birds, insects or leaves, is a mysterious assemblage of variants of certain prototypes:  a riddle of nature's abhorrence of exact repetition, or inability to produce it.  Just as the human hand cannot repeat its own gesture, I invoke this disturbing law, switching my own immobile herds into that rhythm." (Magdalena Abakanowicz from New York, Marlborough Gallery, Magdalena Abakanowicz, October - November 1989, p. 37)