curated by Angela Vettese

From 10 April to 26 June 2009, the personal exhibition, curated by Angela Vettese, presented a selected group of large-scale works, created in fifty years of activity by the Polish artist, which testify to her versatility in the use of materials – from cortèn to bronze to aluminium, from rope to yarns and tangles of jute fabrics – and in the description of the human condition.

Space to experience, a term dear to her – which gives the initiative its title – in fact means spaces to be experienced with all the senses. For Magdalena Abakanowicz, the work is the exhibition as a whole, an installation with many techniques but aimed at creating an atmosphere of general unease, amazement for life and at the same time the inextricable difficulty of living.

Among the works present in the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation, we note the Abakans, rounded hand-woven surfaces, dyed black or, more rarely, red and orange. The rope with which they are made was found by the artist in landfills on the banks of the Vistula river and without really being able to see its spatial development; only later, laid out and set up, did these objects reveal themselves to be groups of metaphorical presences that alluded to crowds of people, and to fragments of matter and cells of fluid: their movements, once installed vertically, resembled a sea moved by rhythmic waves.