Peeling Back the Layers of Alina Szapocznikow’s Bodily Sculptures
via HYPERALLERGIC
As a new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth demonstrates, part of Szapocznikow’s extraordinary accomplishment as an artist was her ability to represent what many after World War II felt was unrepresentable.
n her work, Szapocznikow readily welcomed the influences of Surrealism and Pop Art, along with many other twentieth century innovations. Yet part of Szapocznikow’s extraordinary accomplishment as an artist was her ability to represent the unspeakable experiences of her childhood. When the war was over, the rest of the world became familiar, through photographs, with what Szapocznikow knew intimately from her own experiences: desiccated, emaciated corpses stacked in piles, their skin like rubber, their bodies collapsed into the void created by starvation; dismembered bodies; bodies whose insides and outsides could no longer be distinguished; not to mention her exposure to the suffering of those bodies while they were still inhabited.