In a blog post, Google explained the design behind Abakanowicz’s Doodle, writing: “Is it a tapestry or a sculpture? Magdalena Abakanowicz’s figures of woven fibre broke the mold when she pioneered a new category of art known as Abakans … Thank you for sharing the fabric of your life with the world.”
One of Poland’s most internationally acclaimed artists, Abakanowicz was born on June 20, 1930. She gained a reputation in the mid-1960s for her textiles and towering textile structures suspended from the gallery ceiling.
In the 1970s, she took up sculpture, first using jute and metal, and later creating spatial installations across the world, her best-known cycles including Standing Figures, The Plowman, War Games and Katharsis.
Magdalena Abakanowicz. Photo: PAP/Grzegorz Momot
She had more than 100 individual exhibitions, and her work is now in the collections of some 120 museums and private galleries, including the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Her latest exhibition at London’s Tate Modern was a huge success. It closed last month.
Abakanowicz died in 2017 at the age of 86.
(mk/gs)