The Bambini installation by the late Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz has been sold at auction in Warsaw for 13.6 million zloty (€2.95 million), the highest price ever paid for a piece of art in Poland. The work has also become the artist’s most expensive.
The installation is made up of 83 child-sized statues without arms or heads. Each figure was individually sculpted by the artist between 1998 and 1999.
“They are a sign of persisting fear,” wrote Abakanowicz in 2002. “They are a confrontation with quantity and with one’s own self. They are the spell of the existing crowd, into which I introduce my own immobile one.”
The Polish sculptor, who died in 2017, became famous for working across a number of mediums, including large fibre works later dubbed “Abakans” as well as her meditations on crowds, made from canvas, bronze, cast iron and concrete.
Bambini was created for the Palais-Royal Garden in Paris and first exhibited during the “Abakanowicz on the Roof” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Outside of Poland, it has since been exhibited in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Romania.
On Tuesday it sold for 13,617,361 zloty, including auction fees, to an unnamed buyer. That broke a record set just last week of 13.4 million zloty for Andrzej Wróblewski’s painting Two Married Women.
Earlier this year, another Abakanowicz work, Crowd III, had set a previous record of 13.2 million zloty. Before that, she also held the record with her set of 20 statues entitled Caminando, which sold in October 2019 for over 8 million zloty.
Caminando had until 2018 belonged to the late actor Robin Williams and his wife Marsha. Abakanowicz’s works are held by more than 70 museums and galleries around the world.
Tuesday’s entire auction at the Polswiss Art auction house in Warsaw was also the largest ever by turnover in Poland, with total sales of 43 million zloty.
Main image credit: Polswiss Art/Facebook
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
