Born near Warsaw, Poland, Magdalena Abakanowicz experienced the horrors of World War II as an adolescent and, later, the repressions of the Soviet regime. These experiences indelibly marked the artist’s work; her mysterious sculptures allude to violence, loss, decay, and mourning. In 1982 Abakanowicz was invited by the French cultural ministry to visit the industrial district of Le Creusot. There, she found a selection of monumental casting models for the engines of ships, submarines, canons, turbines, and other machinery. Cutting away parts to focus on the essential form of each model, Abakanowicz revealed swelling interior shapes that suggested the human belly. The artist saw an analogy between the energy generated by an engine and that created by the stomach. She found these forms to be “helpless but very aggressive.”

The central elements of this sculpture, which Abakanowicz called “sarcophagi”—a Greek word meaning “flesh eaters,” as well as a term referring to a type of ancient funerary vessel—are composed of oak over wood-and-metal understructures. The artist installed her sarcophagi on new bases and enclosed them within structures of glass and steel, both to protect and to contain the potential energy they represent.