Alina Szapocznikow

Alina Szapocznikow (1926, Kalisz - 1973, Praz-Coutant in France) is one of the most important post-war Polish artists and one of the most original sculptors of the 20th century. She came from a Jewish family of doctors; as a teenager she survived the Holocaust - the ghetto in Pabianice and the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt. After the war she trained as a sculptor in Prague and Paris (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts); in 1951, ill with tuberculosis, she returned to Poland, and in time emigrated again to Paris.

After a short episode of Socialist Realism, reworked in her own way, Szapocznikow moved towards figuration and abstraction, only to radically redefine sculpture in the 1960s as an intimate record of memory and of her own body. The breakthrough was the casting of her own body - from „Leg” (1962) to casts of lips, breasts and faces modelled in synthetic resin, polyurethane and polyester, reworked, enlarged and multiplied. The body is for her a carrier of both drama and sensual pleasure; in 1965, for the sculpture „Goldfinger”, she received the award of the Copley Foundation, on whose jury sat Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst.

In 1969 the artist was diagnosed with breast cancer - from then on she referred to her illness in a bold, previously unheard-of way (the cycles „Tumours” and „Tumours Personified”), and in the last year of her life she created the „Herbarium” - flattened casts of her own body and that of her son. She developed an individual language with which she confronted the trauma of the Holocaust and the disintegration of the body. Her work is today undergoing an international revaluation: in 2012 MoMA in New York showed the retrospective „Sculpture Undone 1955-1972”, and since 2018 her legacy has been represented by the renowned Hauser & Wirth gallery.