Acclaimed sculptor Abakanowicz passes away

Magdalena Abakanowicz, famous for her brooding forms sculptor passed away at age 86. She died after a long illness, her husband, Jan Kosmowski, said. Abakanowicz, who once described her sculpture as “a search for organic mysteries,” first attracted critical attention in the 1960s with free-standing woven works made from sisal that she unraveled from discarded ships’ ropes and dyed, this type of works of art was later called Abakany, after her. “Like all of Abakanowicz’s cycles, the ‘Abakans’ lead outward, away from what they might appear to represent, into psychology and history, toward fundamental links between human beings and nature that are always waiting to be recognized and explored by the imagination,” the critic Michael Brenson wrote in Art Journal in 1995. In 2015, over a hundred of her sculptures were shown at the Venice Biennale under the title "Crowd and Individual". Abakanowicz had over 100 individual exhibitions and her work is in the collections of over 70 museums and private galleries, including the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, MOMA in New York, , the Centre George Pompidou in Paris.