Warsaw’s Life

Until 28 August 2022, in the National Museum in Wrocław you can visit an exhibition of Magdalena Abakanowicz, entitled Abakanowicz. Total. Abakanowicz was internationally the best-known contemporary Polish artist; she was widely known for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium and her outdoor installations. Her usually monumental works are now in the collections of the most important museums in the world. 

The tapestry we present today is a blown-up copy of the front page of the popular Polish newspaper Życie Warszawy (literally, “Warsaw’s Life”) from 25 May 1973. That year, during a stay in Paris, the artist was exposed to a new popular art trend, Photorealism, which seems to have inspired this “newsprint” piece. The artist combined the tradition of French figurative tapestry with Anglo-American Pop Art’s fascination with the mundane and banal. But these Western approaches are filtered through her Eastern European perspective. Reproducing a photographic portrait of First Secretary (of the ruling communist party in Poland) Edward Gierek, the tapestry renders and preserves a fragment of real life under Communism. 

Was Życie Warszawy only about playing with form and reinterpreting some part of the Western artistic tradition and a current, fashionable trend? Or did it reveal the artist’s passive entanglement with the politics of Gierek’s era? Maybe, in its referencing Pop Art’s aesthetic and images of comic book heroes, her portrayal of the party leader was rather satirical, betraying the artist’s ironic distance to the system’s reality? Or perhaps—as Abakanowicz insisted herself—it was a picture of an “unreal reality” presented by the newspaper “that nobody read and which was just used instead to wrap herring.”

- Iwona Gołaj 

P.S. Meet the Abakans, monumental and unique sculptures by Magdalena Abakanowicz!

P.P.S. Don't miss our collection of 50 postcards with masterpieces created by Women Artists in the DailyArt Shop!