Alina Szapocznikow (b.1926, Kalisz, Poland; d. 1973, Praz-Coutant, France) was a Polish sculptor. She held a unique position in the post-war European avant-garde. In the 1960s and early 1970s, she was one of the first artists to experiment with polyester, which she used to create casts of her face and body and then montage them into absurd and simultaneously sexually charged assemblages. Szapocznikow’s oeuvre spans a continuously productive period from the 1950s to her untimely death in 1973. Her drawings and sculptures represent a previously unseen fusion of a late dark Surrealism with the bright and sexually provocative side of Pop Art.
For Szapocznikow, the human body was the source of all joy, pain and truth. She made it the main subject of her art, depicting the physical body in a bold, courageous manner. In her work, there is a fascination with youth and beauty, eroticism and sex, but also with illness, transience and death. Based on her personal experience of war and captivity and then many years battling cancer, she created a visual language all her own to reflect the changes going on in a human body.
With support from The Polish Institute in Stockholm.
