To Exalt the Ephemeral: Alina Szapocznikow, 1962-1972

About

The visceral, playful, and uncanny aspects of the human bodily experience lay at the center of Szapocznikow’s oeuvre. Born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1926, the artist survived internment in concentration camps as a teenager during the Holocaust. After the war, Szapocznikow trained as a sculptor in both Prague and Paris, returning to Poland in 1951. By the 1960’s she was radically employing sculpture to render an intimate record of both her memories and her own body in the present. Pioneering in its use of new and unconventional materials (from tinted polyester resin and polyeurethane foam, to everyday items such as pantyhose, newspaper clippings, and grass), Szapocznikow’s art amounts to a powerful meditation on what she once described as ‘a fleeting instant, a trivial instant… our terrestrial passage.’ Produced during one of the most sociopolitically complex periods of the twentieth century, her pliant, sensual casts and sculptures of body parts are ecstatic and abject, playful and disturbing, direct and elusive. Unapologetic in their expression of the female experience, including that of terminal illness, Szapocznikow’s works remain hauntingly relevant today.