12 Seated Figures

Magdalena Abakanowicz is one of the most original personalities in European visual art in the 20th century. Together with Louise Bourgeois(1911–2010), Eva Hesse (1936–1970) and Rachel Whiteread (*1963) she is one of the most important sculptresses of the second half of the 20th century. She enriched the world art by the element of a monumental headless figurine, a symbol of the bitter experience of man in modern society. Since 2011 the Olomouc Art Museum pens a set of twelve seated life-size figures, done in 1974 -1976 in her cramped Warsaw studio. The figures are an essence of the atmosphere of normalization, which the artist combined with her personal experience of the Second World War. The group of figures is an original expression of the feeling of estrangement and absence of understanding but its size also points out the dangers of mob behaviour and the manipulation and demagogy current in totalitarian regimes.