Dark Visions Of Primal Myth

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ARTIST: MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ

WHERE: MARLBOROUGH GALLERIES, MANHATTAN; P.S. 1, LONG ISLAND CITY

WHAT: SCULPTURES

THE BOTTOM LINE: In bronze, burlap and tree trunks, a powerful Polish artist forges the drama of human loss and survival.

In American culture, Philip Roth remarked before the fall of communism, everything goes and nothing matters, whereas in Central Europe nothing goes and everything matters. One remembers this when looking at the work of the Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz, who lives and works in Warsaw but whose American reputation has been growing steadily since the early '80s. Her two current New York shows -- one at the Marlborough Galleries through June 5, the other, curated by the art critic Michael Brenson, at P.S. 1 in Long Island City through June 20 -- ought to be seen by anyone who cares about today's sculpture.

Abakanowicz, 63, has a huge talent. Her work draws on deep wells of feeling, myth and metaphor. Its images strike to the heart, not in any sentimental way, but equally without any of the clever-clever flittering of Postmodernism. Some of her sculpture has a strong political undercurrent, not in the feeble, travestied sense of much current "political art," but in a deeper level of articulation: "My whole life," she once remarked, "has been formed and deformed by wars and revolutions of various kinds, mass hatred and mass worship." To have lived in Poland through the successive waves of its disastrous history since 1939 -- right up to the post-Soviet present when, she wrote in 1990, "hand-to-hand-fighting has begun, each against each, zealously trying to drag everything toward a private nest" -- such a background cannot help giving a special character to a sculptor's use of the "heroic" figure, to her ideas on the body's status as a container of esthetic feeling, to her sense of the monumental. How can you imagine a monument in a culture that has been ideologically corrupt for half a century?

Abakanowicz's work meets this problem head on. It moves between nature and culture, referring to earlier art and yet coming out of intense experiences of the real world of rocks and trees and human bodies. She interrogates and reimagines the language of figurative sculpture with the same degree of intensity that Richard Serra's work brings to the idea of abstract minimalism. Until a full retrospective of her work is done in the U.S., these two shows give a fair idea of it.

There are small sculptures at Marlborough, Abakanowicz's hallmark figures, molded from resin-stiffened burlap. Headless and repetitious, they look "expressionist" but aren't: their true ancestors are ancient kouroi and Egyptian scribes planted on their plinths. It is amazing to see how much inward dignity Abakanowicz can give to a human figure made of cloth, and how many subtle variations she can infuse into a whole row of them. They are funereal: the wrinkled burlap reminds you of mummified skin. When Abakanowicz lines up 10, 20 or 30 more or less identical figures, as in Infantes, 1992, you think of prison lines and victims of firing squads.