Magdalena Abakanowicz has titled this exhibition “Wild Flowers.”  She has said the cycle of drawings that are its focus originated in 1998 with the rendering of one real flower and, from this study of nature, led her to recreate from memory other flowers and herbs of her childhood.  Flowers can be evocative of a place, a landscape, a time; we press them as an aide-mémoire.  No mere decorative adornment, flowers are also symbols of growth (to flower) and achievement (the flowering).  They celebrate birth and beauty.  They are practical, too, serving medicinal purposes.  Abakanowicz’s flowers are wild, not the product of horticultural breeding.  While on one level, they emanate from the indigenous vegetation of places from the artist’s past, on another level, they speak—as does all her art—to the nature of things and to our world and our existence as a species within it. 

The validity of the universal view has been challenged and in many ways stripped of its preeminence in recent decades.  Critical theory has deconstructed the universalizing impulse, revealing it as generalizations of implicit colonialist arrogance.  Culturally specific, site specific, locally specific, community specific: these are the terms that have come into use to differentiate peoples, their cultures and their aesthetic sensibilities.  We have recoiled from the “universal” as a functional concept in our multicultural, pluralistic world.  Yet some artists—of which Abakanowicz figures among the very few of our time—remind us that “universal” is not a passé notion but an idea essential to the understanding of our humanity.  In revealing the aspects we share, the artist plays a critical role in society. 

Through the singular example, Abakanowicz speaks of all in the genus.  A drawing of a flower  is never of a particular plant, just as each of the “Faces” (1981) in her earliest cycle of major drawings are never portraits. Rather, the content of her flowers is of indisputable universal relevance: birth and death, pain and suffering, endurance and  transcendence. So one flower tells of all life as one speck of sand tells of the earth and passage of time. Monumental, not delicate in scale, they have a presence that is capable of taking on other images and more profound themes.  In their multiplication, these flowers (or faces and heads, or bodies and backs throughout her oeuvre) comprise a morphology, as the range of forms are not only variants of one another but also transfigurations that move between the micro- and macrocosmic worlds.  A similar process occurs in the work of American photographer John Coplans, where autobiography fades in the face of the universal, and where the body is transformed into a morphology of abstract and actual references, into something other and more significant than itself.  For Abakanowicz, as for Coplans, ambiguity allows for self-identification and collective empathy.

In Abakanowicz’s world, a meta-geneology links all species, nature, and humankind.  A fly, for instance, is very small and insignificant thing; at the same time tens of thousands of different species of flies exist.  In her cycle “Flies,” Abakanowicz chooses this tiny subject to reveal the transformative process that marks its life.  Birth of Fly represents a moment of metamorphosis from egg to larva to pupa within its protective covering or cocoon, as it makes its way to adulthood.  Abakanowicz’s cocoon is a nest of many strokes and textures that contains and nestles a creature already taking on head and bodylike forms—images which transport the viewer from insect to human world.  The cocoon becomes a womb, recalling the swirling, generative centers around the navel in her cycle “Bodies” (1981).  Then, like the “Faces,” it is a cranium, too, as egg becomes skull.  The mature insect form in Drawing from the Cycle “Flies” references as well these cycles begun nearly twenty years ago:  it has the general curved outline of one of her “Faces”; likewise, it has the elongated trunk of her “Bodies,” here with the outstretched arms having metamorphosed into the insect’s long legs.

Two of Abakanowicz’s recent flower works—Flower Menthae and Flower of Grimek—are also formally tied to her cycles of “Faces.”  Each has an ovoid shape like her earlier heads. They both possess a pronounced cranium: in the former, it is a deep black area; in the latter, a more cocoonlike section made with gestural strokes. Each tapers, as if to the chin, and is divided in half evoking the symmetry of facial features.  Flower of Grimek separates further into upper and lower halves, divided by thick black repeated strokes in the place where the brow and eyes would be. 

This division into four becomes more assertive in Krempa Flower, Herba Thymi Flower, Salvia Flower, and Flower of Minmus Pali.  As a result, this family of flowers is characterized by a clearly defined central element, where the petals connect and where would be found the pistil.  This circular, lighter area at the middle of each flower appears to be like an opening and alludes to the navel, the site of birth, a center of energy.  Out from this common point of origin, the four petals occupy distinct quadrants and assume a configuration like that of a gamete or sex cell during meiosis or reproduction when the cell divides twice, creating initially in a cluster of four cells.  (Each of these haploid cells has the potential to combine with the complementary cells of a fertilizing partner, thus creating a new organism or zygote that contains the DNA of both parent organisms.)  Thus, this image of a flower in four parts makes reference to the birth of new cells, both their own replication and their role as the basic unit in the multiplication of a species.  This fundamental genetic process of living things makes the members within a given species alike, as are these wild flowers, and yet, at the same time, unique by virtue of the cell’s  individual chromosomal structure or DNA.  The place of the individual is not lost within the masses: flowers are miniscule within the landscape but each has their own shape and beauty and, like a living cell, they are an essential part of nature, giving rise to greater forms.  So, too, a person is one among hundreds of millions yet the individual, like a cell, is important as the unit from which cultures and civilizations are born.

The image of birth takes on another form in Vere Dignum Flower where the flower becomes a vagina.   American artist Georgia O’Keeffe earlier in this century had asserted the female sexual power of flowers in her paintings.  Dramatically rendered, Abakanowicz’s flower is the female body: rounded breasts at the top, darkly shaded and outlined in black; the belly filling the top half, while the knees are bent with thighs and legs thrust upward, revealing the site of sex and of birth.  This shape, with its body reference, is carried out more abstractly in Tempor Mutantur Flower where the spine and hips, shoulders and back are rendered in soft washes of gray and fingered strokes of black.  Then the form begins to split more pronouncedly in Cali Efervescente Flower while, with Asidum Folicum Flower and Serion Flower, imagery shifts between petal and pistil, male and female genitalia.  Cycyna Flower is like the shape of a pelvic bone, bifurcated along the spine and, with a curved line across its width, it suggests a concave upper plate and cupping form of the pubis.  Herein lies the womb and the human-in-metamorphosis prior to birth.  A figure in three-quarter view emerges out of the form of Hibiscus Flower where the upper half, divided by dark lines, becomes breasts or shoulders, and the dark areas of shading in the lower right create a fully volumetric, pregnant form, the distended shape of the body touched by fingers that define its form in a play of different grays and textures.    

Women’s bodies have been identified not only with flowers, but also, on a grander scale, with the earth itself.  For the ancients, the undulations of hills and mountains became symbols of fertility and sacred places of worship.  Caves and fissures, associated with the female genitalia, were the sites of creation myths. Contemporary artists reclaimed the land as a site and medium with earthart, but it was feminist artists like Cuban-American Ana Mendieta in her “Silueta” series who reunited the earth with the female body.  Mother Earth had sexual and regenerative powers as well as forbidden and deathly aspects.  Salvia Flower and Vere Dignum Flower, for instance, evoke the image of a mysterious cave and the fear of being consumed by death as well as the possibility of birth.

Abakanowicz had explored nature in her visionary project “Arboreal Architecture” (1991), a  conception of a more ecological coexistence between man and nature.  Drawings entitled Inside Dwelling Trunk (1992) merge torso with tree; towering sculptures of mid-decade fuse hands with trees.   Here Flower of Alusal, Flower of Amineus, and Magnus Ultimus Flower are boulder, body, belly.   Like the other works in this cycle, they also suggest a cell-like division into four sections, the lower areas swelled and full of life. Above, at the center of each, is a triangular opening between the inked areas; it is the navel of the earth and of the body, the cave, the void, a place of mystery and of life.  These areas are, in this ongoing metamorphosis, a transformation of the flower’s center and pistil (seen in Krempa, Herba Thymi, Salvia, and Flower of Minmus Pali) into the image of the land.  Flower becomes figure becomes landscape, creating a oneness between the earth and the body.  Flower of Alusal is an abstracted landscape without discernable features; two dots of ink along a central axis—the navel of the earth and of the body—are connected by a threadlike line.  In Flower of Amineus a white space at midpoint is like a burst of light through an opening in the trees; ink pushed with the fingers—literal human energy lines—define two lobes.  In Magnus Ultimus Flower  the upper half reads like a Chinese landscape painting (mountains, rocks, waterfall, and misty rainfall) created by washes, bleeding, and daubing of ink.  It is significant that Abakanowicz chooses Chinese ink as a primary medium for these works.  Partaking of this material and the subject of landscape, in a morphological relationship to all of nature and human form, she combines East and West, further universalizing her artistic statements. 

Landscape painting has held a special place in Eastern culture and art.  (The artist traces her own background to the Mongolian tribes of Asia.)  The animistic philosophy of the Taoists exerted a profound influence on the emergence of this genre.  As an intellectual and spiritual force, the Taoists emphasized the place of man in nature and the attainment of insight into reality by identifying one’s soul with the Ultimate Essence, the Tao, the life-giving and eternal—universal—spirit that pervades the cosmos.  By painting landscapes, artists were directly expressing the belief in the unity of man and nature.  To the Chinese, all animate and inanimate things are  the manifestations of this spirit or the workings of this energy called ch’i (literally breath or valor). It is this cosmic spirit that gives life to all things (growth to trees, movement to water, energy to man); it is exhaled by the mountains in the form of clouds, mist, and rain.  When Italian arte povera artist Guiseppe Penone pressed his body into a standing, wet clay form, molding body to earth, he gave it final shape by releasing his breath and infusing it with ch’i.  Chinese landscape painters of the past sought to express this life force, attuning themselves to the cosmic spirit in the world and becoming infused with its energy.  Creating works of art was their way of evoking ch’i: the artist was a vehicle for the expression of ch’i and creating art directly transmitted energy or ch’i.

In Chinese tradition, ink brush painting was the artistic means that best expressed ch’i.  Brushmarks stood for materiality while areas of blankness connoted the void and immateriality; together mass and void expressed spirituality.   It was, in fact, out of a need to convey the cosmic spirit of nature that not only landscape painting became a favored genre, but also by the eighth century, the use of a more sensual palette was abandoned in favor of the more spiritualizing style of  monochromatic ink painting .  Abakanowicz adopts this method to convey, in her own terms, the life force of being.  Adding to her earlier repertoire in charcoal of line and texture, rubbings,  smearings, and erasures, here she uses Chinese black ink (itself traditionally made from carbon) to create a vast range of tonalities and atmospheric effects, as this fluid medium spontaneously responds to the intrinsic qualities of the paper.  The many lines and gestures and literal fingerstrokes possess a strength and physicality that tells of the movement of her hand and of her body.  She fills the paper and the paper, correspondingly, is absorbed by an energy of lines.  In the process, these drawings become charged with energy—and this energy is ch’i.