Yvonne Pacanovsky Bobrowicz (1928-2022): The Cosmic Series
Curated by Barbara Stehle, Ph.D.
April 25, 2024 – June 1, 2024 at Sapar Contemporary Gallery, New York, NY
Fiber artist Yvonne Pacanovsky Bobrowicz (1928-2022) passed away at the age of 94 in September 2022 and her work is now being exhibited in a solo exhibition at Sapar Contemporary Gallery in New York City.
The exhibition “Yvonne Pacanovsky Bobrowicz: The Cosmic series”, curated by Dr. Barbara Stehle at Sapar Contemporary, presents for the first time in New York City the artist’s luminous hand-knotted sculptures. About 20 works are included, amongst them a few early wall pieces from the 1980s and the sculptural monofilament “Cosmic series” developed in Bobrowicz’s last two decades.
The works exemplify her stunning achievements with both natural and man-made materials. For over 70 years, Yvonne Pacanovsky Bobrowicz worked with a wide variety of fibers and metals to author a new kind of art. Bobrowicz belonged to a generation of weavers that changed the perception of the technique and its production. The actors on the textile artistic scene in the second part of the XXth century were still mostly women (Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Olga de Amaral etc…) with a few remarkable exceptions (Jack Lenore Larsen, Ed Rossbach). They pretty much all knew each other, or of each other. They showed their work but struggled to enter museum collections and get the “art” label. But this did not stop the weavers. The field was a territory filled with surprises and inventions. By the early 1970s, their isolation in craft, outside of the art scene, ceased to be. Fibers, knots and weaves entered the vocabulary of process art and the rise of feminism pushed the works forward. Fiber artists contributed some of the most powerful creations of the period. And Yvonne Pacanovsky Bobrowicz was one of them.
Curated by Dr. Barbra Stehle Ph.D, the exhibition is accompanied an extensive essay on the artists 70-year career and the importance of her work in the transition of Fiber Art to be considered Fine Art as well as the contribution of women artists to the development of abstraction in the 20th century.
More exhibition information can be found here.
Image: Yvonne Pacanovsky Bobrowicz, Cosmic series, Green. Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary Gallery.
