To Exalt the Ephemeral

Tracing a body of work by Alina Szapocznikow from 1962 to 1972, this book considers pivotal turning points in the Polish artist's life and career. Featuring new photography, the publication aims to render the tactility and spatiality of these works in brilliant new detail. 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. Exhibition: Hauser & Wirth, New York, USA (29.10.-21.12.2019).