Alina Szapocznikow, 1962 – 1972

To Exalt the Ephemeral

29 October - 21 December 2019

New York, 69th Street

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present its first solo exhibition devoted to Alina Szapocznikow since undertaking representation of the artist’s estate in May 2018. 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.

Installation views

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About the Artist

Alina Szapocznikow

Born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1926, Alina Szapocznikow survived internment in concentration camps during the Holocaust as a teenager. Immediately after the war, she moved first to Prague and then to Paris, studying sculpture at the École des Beaux Arts. In 1951, suffering from tuberculosis, she was forced to return to Poland, where she expanded her practice. When the Polish government loosened controls over creative freedom following Stalin’s death in 1952, Szapocznikow moved into figurative abstraction and then a pioneering form of representation. By the 1960s, she was radically re-conceptualizing sculpture as an intimate record not only of her memory, but also of her own body.

In 1962, Szapocznikow experienced a breakthrough when she began to cast her own body in plaster. Her first work with this approach, ‘Noga (Leg)’, 1962 depicts the artist’s right leg—a very public statement on the human corpus as vehicle of pleasure, liberation, illness, death, and decomposition. She spoke of this turn in her development: ‘Haunted by the increasingly academic nature of abstract art, and at the same time, partly out of my spirit of contradiction and partly perhaps out of some artistic exhibitionism, I made a cast of my own leg and an assemblage of casts of my face… Fortunately we believe that in art everything has been already, so nothing has been yet.’

Szapocznikow was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1969, a turn of events that shaped her later sculptural and photographic efforts. In a series of sculptures titled ‘Tumors,’ made of resin, gauze, crumpled newspapers, and photographs, the artist gave form to the anxiety and existential challenges of illness. Szapocznikow’s final works express her pointed desire to engage with something deeper and ineffable, physical and psychological, the symptoms of bodily experiences and the traces of what we leave behind. She wrote, ‘Despite everything, I persist in trying to fix in resin the traces of our body: I am convinced that of all the manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of all joy, all suffering, and all truth.’