At Helsinki Art Museum, Magdalena Abakanowicz: Crossing Boundaries brings the visionary Polish artist’s monumental fibre works to Finland for the first time, on view from May 6th to August 30th, 2026 at the Tennis Palace. Spanning immersive installations, towering woven forms, and haunting burlap figures, the exhibition traces how Magdalena Abakanowicz shattered the limits of textile art, pushing it into the realm of sculpture, architecture, and environment.
Widely recognised as a pioneer of organic, fibre-based sculpture, Abakanowicz revolutionised the language of textiles in the 1960s and 1970s with her celebrated Abakans — immense suspended forms that seemed to breathe, sag, and pulse within space. No longer decorative surfaces, her woven structures possessed the physical force of living bodies, turning fibre into something visceral, monumental, and deeply unsettling.
Textile sculptures and organic forms that reshaped the language of contemporary sculpture
Across HAM’s vaulted halls, 58 works created over six decades gather into a dense landscape of rope, burlap, woven matter, and human fragments. Early textile compositions and monumental hanging forms appear almost architectural, arranged according to the artist’s original instructions so that visitors move through them as though entering a forest of organic membranes and suspended skins. Material becomes atmosphere: rough fibres absorb light, cast shadows, and carry the tactile memory of labour and touch.
The exhibition then shifts toward Abakanowicz’s iconic burlap figures from the 1970s onward—headless crowds, hollow torsos, and biomorphic masses that hover between human remains and geological relics. Repetition, vulnerability, anonymity, and collective trauma run through these works, shaped by the artist’s experience of war, political oppression, and the fragility of the body itself.
Among the highlights is Abakan Monumental Composition (1973–75), rising more than 12 metres high, alongside immersive installations that emphasise the raw physicality of her sculptural language. Screenings of the documentary Abakany (1970) and the recent film ABAKAMANIA. Magdalena Abakanowicz – An Individual Artist (2025) further illuminate the radical scope of her practice.
Accompanying the exhibition, HAM has also released Magdalena Abakanowicz: Crossing Boundaries, the first Finnish publication dedicated to the artist — a richly illustrated volume bringing together archival material, essays, and previously unpublished texts examining her enduring influence on contemporary sculpture and installation art.
Installation view from the exhibition Magdalena Abakanowicz: Crossing Boundaries. HAM HELSINKI ART MUSEUM 6.5.–30.8.2026
Photography by MAIJA TOIVANEN, courtesy of HAM
