Dark Visions Of Primal Myth

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Each trunk is laid horizontally on trestles or a steel frame. All are, in some legible or at least imaginable way, figures. Great Ursa, 1987, suggests a woman giving birth. The wooden trunk of Giver, 1992, is shaped like an enormous hand. The metal beak of Sroka, 1992, juts at you like the ramming prow of an ancient galley, while the big blade of steel that splits the body of Winged Trunk, 1989, could be read either as a weapon that has given the body its deathblow or as a protective shield. Sometimes the metal fittings read as shells or tusks, sometimes as prostheses and sometimes as primitive tools from a remote past haunted by medieval forest fears. This passive- aggressive imagery is strongly affecting. It also makes you realize how sharply metaphors drawn from the natural world can still affect us. Abakanowicz's art insists that the organic cannot be evaded or denied -- not, at any rate, without a cultural loss that amounts to mutilation. For through the organic, myth is repaired.