"Explore a forest of towering woven sculptures: 

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In the 1960s and 70s, the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz created radical sculptures from woven fibre. They were soft not hard; ambiguous and organic; towering works that hung from the ceiling and pioneered a new form of installation. They became known as the Abakans. This exhibition presents a rare opportunity to explore this extraordinary body of work. Many of the most significant Abakans will be brought together in a forest-like display in the 64-metre long gallery space of the Blavatnik Building at Tate Modern. The exhibition explores this transformative period of Abakanowicz’s practice when her woven forms came off the wall and into three-dimensional space. With these works she brought soft, fibrous forms into a new relationship with sculpture. A selection of early textile pieces and her little-known drawings are also on show."

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/magdalena-abakanowicz

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"Abakanowicz’s most iconic works from this early period are woven constructions made of sisal—a coarse plant fiber that she derived from discarded ropes. These comprise numerous surface layers, folds, and appendages. While the works are able to be stored and to travel flat—crucial given the artist’s confined working conditions—they become monumental three-dimensional objects once suspended from the ceiling. With their organic materiality and undulating shapes, these works, known as the “Abakans” (shorthand for the artist’s name), carry distinct bodily associations—evoking vaginal imagery, animal skins, or tribal garments. At the time of their creation, the Abakans straddled what were then considered discrete categories of the arts: the decorative arts on the one hand, with which weaving was often associated, and fine art on the other. Yet, as the artist later reminisced, they didn’t fit neatly with the trends of either category. “The Abakans irritated people,” Abakanowicz said. “They came at the wrong time. In fabric it was the French tapestry, in art: Pop art and Conceptual art; and here was a huge, magical thing.”1 Under the Soviet regime, art had to serve a function in society, and any trappings of spirituality were deemed suspect. The Abakans’ close association with mysticism was therefore politically charged, and was acknowledged by the artist only in hindsight." 

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"Yellow Abakan was exhibited in MoMA’s 1969 exhibition Wall Hangings and acquired by the Museum five years later. That exhibition, organized under the auspices of the Museum’s Department of Architecture and Design, was responsible for introducing the burgeoning developments in fiber art, and for broadly staking a place for them within the “context of twentieth-century art.”2 It is telling that Yellow Abakan made its way into MoMA’s collection as a design object and not as sculpture. As has been noted, the general shortage of paintings and sculptures by women artists in MoMA’s collection around the time of the Wall Hangings exhibition—and, even more so, by non-Western artists—is somewhat allayed when we look at the broader holdings of the Museum around that time, in “mediums whose histories occupied the margins of the art world, and where women therefore found easy access.”3"

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"Although the Abakans helped cement Abakanowicz’s reputation, by the late 1970s, she began to feel constricted by them, as well as by the Polish artistic milieu with which she had become associated (and wryly referred to as “the ghetto of weavers”4). She began to turn toward a more fully fledged sculptural practice that broadened her interest in organic materials and forms. Abakanowicz’s works from this period on were mostly conceived as “cycles,” a term that not only captures their treatment of a single theme across a group of elements but also relates metaphorically to her occupation with biological cycles and their attendant themes of metamorphosis, decay, and renewal.  Pregnant, a signature work from this period, comprises twenty-three elements, which range in size from large, pod-shaped parcels packed with twigs—whose bulges are suggestive of the work’s title—to individual branches. Each sculptural element is intricately coiled in wire, as if encased in a delicate metal armature, and placed directly on the floor in loose configuration. If Yellow Abakan registers as a shell or a skin, in Pregnant we may see an “invitation to look inside the body cavity itself,”5 to the internal matter of bones and sinew. Together, these works speak to Abakanowicz’s singular ability to mold castaway objects into highly charged, almost physical beings that pulsate with life."

https://post.moma.org/magdalena-abakanowiczs-magical-things-at-the-museum-of-modern-art/