<p>This summer, Wrocław will be hosting a sprawling retrospective exhibition of the work of influential Polish sculptor <strong>Magdalena Abakanowicz</strong>, who sadly passed away in April of this year. Titled <em>Effigies of Life: A Tribute to Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017)</em>, the exhibition will open on June 23rd and feature more than 200 works spanning the entirety of Abakanowicz's career. Gruesome as it sounds, the show was actually planned before her death; of course, it was originally meant to be a tribute to the living artist. Although Abakanowicz herself was too ill to be involved in much of the prep, organisers collaborated closely with her studio.</p> <p>The main exhibition will be held at the city's semi-recently opened art gallery at the main railway station, but the action will also spill out into other art institutions around the city as well as less traditional venues including the <strong>Starchowice Airport</strong> and the <strong>Bastion Ceglarski fort</strong>. Wrocław’s brand-spanking-new library located in the ul. Świdnicka underpass (the spot where ul. Świdnicka dips underneath ul. Kazimierza Wielkiego) will host the monumental series <em>War Games</em>, while the massive bronze <em>Walking Man </em>will be installed in front of the Jewish Synagogue. The series <em>Bambini</em>, which comprises a whopping 83 pieces, will be presented in the square in front of the railway station.</p> <p>Known for her work with textiles, the sculptor coined the term <em>Abakans</em> (after her last name) to refer to her earliest major works. While she began her artistic career with painting in the 1950s, her career picked up steam over the next decade, when she started to work with woven materials like sisal, unravelled and dyed from ships' ropes. Her work came to be representative of postwar Poland. The daughter of upper-class folk (who were supposedly descendants of Genghis Khan himself (but then again, who isn't?), Abakanowicz had to assume the fake identity of a clerk's daughter to avoid persecution during communism. As co-curator Maria Rus Bojan put it, "no other Eastern European artist has been able to capture so profoundly in form and content the essence of the human condition experienced by entire nations under communism."</p> <p>Bojan curated the exhibition alongside Mariusz Hermansdorfer, the former director of the <strong>National Museum in Wroclaw</strong>, who was also a friend and collaborator of Abakanowicz. The show's sponsors include the Marchewka Family Foundation and Irmina Nazar and Artur Trawinski, the founders of the European ArtEast Foundation. "I think that if she left the country—and she had offers—other totalitarian movements would be reflected in her work," says Hermansdorfer, who is also in the final stages of assembling a monograph of Abakanowicz's oeuvre. "The capitalist world is so full of violence and influence, manipulation—it is art that shouts, speaking about human problems—about our problems."</p>