She stands like a totem: a spindly humanoid, elongated like one of Giacometti's women, and wrapped in clinging plastic foil. But her oversized breasts are discolored and protruding, and besides there are another four mammary glands collected at her feet. And she has eight lots of lips growing out of her plaster head, which itself contains multiple noses and mouths.
- Alina Szapocznikow
- Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972
- Museum of Modern Art,
- New York
- Until 28 January 2013
- Venue website
This strange form, monstrous but also ecstatic, is Bouquet II (1966), by Alina Szapocznikow – an icon of Polish modern art who is finally receiving the broader attention she deserves. She's made appearances in a few major group shows, such as Paris: Capital of the Arts at London's Royal Academy and Documenta 12 in Kassel. But this is the first full-dress retrospective outside Poland for her fragile, erotic and always disarming sculptures and drawings, and it's a chance to rethink the story of postwar European art behind the iron curtain.
Szapocznikow (pronounced shuh-POTCH-ni-koff) was born in 1926 to a family of non-practising Jews and as a teenager was interned in the ghetto of Łódź, then briefly sent to Auschwitz before spending nearly a year in Bergen-Belsen. Separated from her family, she made her way to Prague after the war – and was shocked to discover that her mother had also survived. After studies in Prague and Paris, she was recalled to the new People's Republic of Poland and began making sculptures in a socialist realist style, several of which are on show here.
It doesn't take long, though, before her figures start to deform. Limbs are elongated, and strange biomorphic shapes appear in her sketches, such as eyeballs contained in what look like oyster shells. As the forms of the body grow less lifelike, they also grow more independent. A plaster cast of Szapocznikow's leg, from 1962, hints at what's to come: limbs, organs, and later faces get detached from their sources, growing into new things and mutating for new circumstances.
In the mid-60s, back in Paris, Szapocznikow began to experiment with materials that had no established place in the studio, such as polyurethane and polyester resin. And instead of relying on moulds, as Eva Hesse would do in the United States a few years later, Szapocznikow used these industrial materials on human bodies, mostly her own. Disembodied lips cast in resin – red, flesh-coloured, or hypothermically blue – recur constantly, snuggled in a nest or lit from within by lamps. Or else there are casts of breasts, sometimes enveloped in puddles of black polyurethane, sometimes served up on a platter like bonbons.
She was diagnosed with cancer in 1969, and her late work exhibits a painful recognition of an early death. Tumors Personified (1971) comprises more than a dozen resin casts of her own face scrunched up into malignant little balls – both a representation of her illness and an index of her suffering body. And her final series, in which she crushes her cast face into two dimensions, is almost too raw to contemplate.
Forty years on, Szapocznikow's brittle sculptures, which oscillate between joy and abjection, remain difficult to unpack. The forms are loaded with meanings we can never quite grasp, and the trials she endured, from the camps to her last illness, inform her work but never fully explain it. There's a temptation to call her the Louise Bourgeois of the east. But there's no longer any need, this late in the game, to validate art from the communist bloc with western analogues. Szapocznikow's work shows an inventiveness and a volatility that makes all comparisons seem moot.