Do you know of anyone who might want to sponsor the preservation of three and a half tons of sculpted cast iron? Well, the Vancouver Biennale might have just the piece for them.
Well, pieces really -- all part of the Headless Walking Figures sculpture created by renowned artist Magdalena Abakanowicz and installed by the Vancouver Biennale at the City Hall Canada Line Station. With each sculpture reaching over nine feet tall and weighing in at 650 kilograms, this isn't your average piece of home decor. There were 20 figures in the work’s first installation at Queen Elizabeth Park in the 2005-2007 Vancouver Biennale but over the past 16 years, all but five have been acquired by various collectors around the world.
Barrie Mowatt, the founder and artistic director for the Vancouver Biennale hopes the remaining Headless Walking Figures will be saved by a local philanthropist and find a permanent home in the City of Vancouver’s public art collection for all citizens to enjoy.
“It was the artist’s intent for the sculptures to provide a revenue stream to support the Vancouver Biennale’s public programming and International Artists Residencies,” Mowatt said in a recent release. “But with the escalation in Abakanowicz prices, the sale of her artwork has been tremendous for the Vancouver-based non-profit charitable arts organization and an impetus for other exhibiting international artists to make legacy donations.”
About the artwork
The statues of Headless Walking Figures appear to be walking aimlessly without sight, and the sombre tone makes reference to both time and loss according to the Vancouver Biennale’s website.
Commissioned specifically for its 2005-2007 exhibition, the original 20 figures were individually cast at an industrial foundry in Śrem, near Poznań, Poland under Abakanowicz’s direction.
“She took great care to differentiate each of the figures, individually applying and manipulating the figurative frame,” reads the work’s description. “These unique traces marked on each individual sculpture make no two figures alike, each wholly unique in their own right.”
A larger group of figures, cast at the same time and by the same artist, is titled Agora and is on permanent display in Chicago’s Grant Park. An agora was a meeting place in ancient Greece where the concept of democracy began. With no citizen above the law, everyone had the power to vote in this unbiased way of life.
In 2017, six Walking Figures sculptures were loaned to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for La Balade pour la Paix: An Open-Air Museum exhibit where the sculpture was seen along with many other celebrated public works of art.
In 2020, three of the Walking Figures were loaned to Arts on the Avenue, a registered non-profit charitable organization in Edmonton, Alberta, that is dedicated to the community it so passionately serves through the cultivation of positive urban renewal.
