Abakanowicz was born in 1930. She came of age against the tumultuous background of World War II. Today she is revered for her uncompromising vision, developed in her native Poland under the hostile eyes of the repressive Communist regime that was in power for most of her adult life. She had, by the 1960s, gained the beginning of an international reputation as a sculptor in soft materials, monumental environments called Abakans. Her retrospective after Paris Mus??e daArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris moved to America to be shown in seven important museums. She changed sculpture from aobject to look ata into aspace to experiencea. Her largest group of monumental 106 figures permanently installed in Chicago consists of 106 individualities in walking movement, headless shells, like bark fallen of a tree or a rag fallen of a mummy.

Monologue

Impenetrable

Before

Evening

Father

Encounter

Summer

Secrets

Christmas Tree

Education

My Sister Teresa

Illness

Necessity

Forebears Ⅰ

Forebears Ⅱ

War

Killing

Mother

1944

The Warsaw Uprising, August 19.44

The Boy

School

Competitions

First Art College

Beds and Dreams

Background

Money

Teachers

Lodging

Family

Own Space

Traveling

Light Switch

Professor Jerzy Soltan

Solo Exhibition

Jan

Father

Mother

Home

Abakans

International Biennale of Tapestry

in Lausanne- 1962

Biennale of Spatial Forms

S~o Paulo Biennale, 1965

New York

First Solo Exhibition in America

Writing

Edinburgh 1972

First Studio--New Space

Backs

Crowds

Embryology

Extracts from my Poem about Soft, 1979

The Venice Biennale in 1980

Brain

Teaching

Australia and Papua-New Guinea, 1976

Indonesia

Japan

Abakano-Kai

Housing Block

Drawing

Katarsis

Negev, 1987

Space of Dragon, 1988

War Games, 1987

Arboreal Architecture

Hiroshima

Akiko Motofuji

America, America

The Artist

Coexistence

House and Garden

Foundries

Incarnations

Acknowledgements

Appendix

Exhibitions

Selected Bibliography