Behind The Scenes: Her Dark Materials

On the second floor of the Block Museum of Art, tucked away behind a door, there is a small hive of human activity where curator Corinne Granof and her fellow employees operate and maintain all exhibitions. Each one is generally planned two to three years in advance, Granof says, and rarely involves contact with the artist or artists on exhibit.

But that was not the case for one of this fall’s three main exhibitions, “Magdalena Abakanowicz: Reality of Dreams.” Abakanowicz is regarded as one of the most important female artists of the twentieth century, Granof says. An artist who was profoundly influenced by the Nazi invasion of Poland, Abakanowicz became famous after World War II for her large installations of rough materials such as burlap, flax, and sisal. The exhibit at the Block Museum showcases her drawings, for which she is less well known, as well as a sculptural grouping of twelve anthropoid figures called “Flock.”

The figures are headless, and each consists of a thin burlap skin held together by resin. They are arranged in interlocking rows against the back wall, as if standing at attention after a long march. You can’t put your finger on it at first, but there’s something missing ­— there is nothing separating the viewer and the waiflike sculptures, no velvet ropes or stanchions. This is deliberate: Abakanowicz insisted that there be no barrier between visitors and the sculptures. Though each figure is fragile and weighs a meager 10 pounds, the exhibition designer, Dan Silverstein, was forced to comply. Her demand is typical of stipulations artists can make, though in all likelihood, Abakanowicz will never see most of the exhibits of her work.

The task of actually selecting the works and then putting them up is left to the museum staff. Granof and fellow curator Debora Wood come up with most of the initial ideas. “The Block focuses on works on paper,” Granof says. Her days involve the meticulous oversight of all the projects prepared by the small curatorial staff. Granof dresses sharply and simply, and her brown hair is cut neatly a couple inches above the shoulder. She speaks in broad, sure strokes, much like the short essays that the curators write to accompany each exhibit.

Besides carrying out the artist’s vision, Silverstein and the rest of the team make a lot of their own aesthetic decisions. The decision to bring “Flock” arose out of a desire to have a connection with Abakanowicz’s “Agora” installation in Grant Park, a series of 106 9-foot-tall cast iron figures that was completed in 2006.

He arrayed the figures of “Flock” so that they look “as if they were materializing out of the wall and coming forward,” he says. Months before an exhibit goes up, Granof, her fellow curator, Debora Wood, and Silverstein pore over a blueprint of each gallery space, arranging thumbnails of each work until they find the right configuration. Then Silverstein, along with a crew that he contracts, takes down the old exhibit, packages it and ships it out. The walls are patched and repainted. A centerline is drawn five feet above the floor to use to align the tableaux. Items are shipped from art warehouses around the country, and with the help of six to eight crew members, each exhibit takes about a week to install.

Abakanowicz’s art focuses on nature and violence and was inspired in part by her past. As a child of aristocrats in 1930s Poland, she was allowed to roam freely in the woods around her parents’ estate outside Warsaw. But Nazi Germany invaded Poland when she was 9 years old, and her family fled to Gdansk for the remainder of the war. “That was the first rupture in her life,” Granof says.

On the east wall of her exhibit, a series of three charcoal drawings depict a human form deteriorating into abstraction. On the right, the human is muscular and defined. The muscle fibers seem to vibrate intensely; there is a palpable tension in the lines. The middle figure is less defined, but with its arms outstretched, you can make out the figure of a crucifix. The one on the left is bloated and insubstantial, testing the limits of recognizability. This is a common theme in Abakonowicz’s drawings, in which, “you see violence in the way she treats bodies, which are often truncated and amputated,” Granof says. “She is interested in the interiors and awful, ugly sides of nature.”

Much of Abakanowicz’s work involves polarities — growth and decay, the individual and society, the minute and the whole — but is united by a fierce insistence on uniqueness. In her autobiography, Fate and Art, she writes, “I do not make editions, copies of one form. Every figure is an individual.”

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