Alina Szapocznikow Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972

Press dossier

WIELS

Alina Szapocznikow : Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972

Curated by Elena Filipovic and Joanna Mytkowska WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, BrusselsSeptember 10, 2011–January 08, 2012

Organized by WIELS and Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Exhibition will travel to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (February 5–May 6, 2012) and to the Museum of Modern Art, New York (October 7, 2012–January 28, 2013).

WIELS Contemporary Art Centre premieres an expansive solo exhibition of Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973). This major event, coinciding with the Polish presidency of the European Union, is one of the first large-scale surveys of the artist’s work outside of Poland and concentrates in particular on her late period from 1955 to her untimely death in the early ‘70s, at age forty-seven. Those years are best described as her experimental period, and it is precisely the artist’s shift to the use of new materials and forms that is the crux around which the exhibition is built.

As a sculptor who began working in the post-war period in a rather classical, figurative manner, Szapocznikow’s rapid development towards a conception of sculpture as an imprint not only of memory but of her own body left behind a legacy of provocative objects – at once sexualized, fragmented, vulnerable, humorous, and political – that still sit between Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, and Pop Art. Her tinted polyester casts of her lips and breasts transformed into quotidian objects like lamps or ashtrays, her poured polyurethane forms, and her construction of sculptures that incorporate photographs remain as remarkably idiosyncratic and contemporary today as they were when they were first made.

Although she was already quite early in her career well-known in Poland where her work has been highly influencial since, her oeuvre remains ripe for art historical re-examination. Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972 comes at an auspicious moment when international interest in her work has blossomed, major public collections have added her to their permanent collections (including the MoMA, NY; Tate, London; Castello di Rivolli, Turin; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), and new publications in English on the artist are forthcoming.

The planned exhibition will feature roughly one hundred artworks, privileging all of the media Szapocznikow wor-ked in, including photography and drawing alongside her primary practice of sculpture and object-making, but also giving place to archival documents and other preparatory and documentary material. Involving loans from private and public collections, from institutions in Poland but also abroad, this exhibition will endeavor to introduce and contextualize the artist’s work to a broader international audience, all while revealing its resolute contemporanity and continuing relevance to discussions of sculpture-making today.

Background on the artist

Born in 1926, in the small Polish town of Kalisz to a Jewish intellectual family, Alina Szapocznikow survived the Second World War in concentration camps with her mother, where the latter worked as a doctor and the artist as her assistant. No reliable accounts of this dramatic period remain today. The mother and daughter managed to survive most likely thanks to the mother’s professional usefulness. Likely Szapocznikow’s compulsive thirst for life and experience, and the great energy and cheer which characterized her life were a riposte to the traumatic events in her early youth. Szapocznikow looked back on her experiences during that period with exceptional reserve, and references to her recollections of those times only started to appear in her work towards the end of her life.

After the war she did not return to Poland but instead to Prague, where she studied sculpture in the studio of Otto Wagner, among others. Later, in 1949, she left for Paris to study at the Ecole de Beaux Arts. At the summons of the Polish government (and threatened with losing her right to be re-admitted to the country), she returned to Poland in 1951 and settled in Warsaw with her husband, the future director of the Łódz Museum of Art, Ryszard Stanisławski, whom she had met in France. It was the time of the escalation of the Cold War, when the borders between Eastern and Western Europe had begun to close. Szapocznikow thus remained in Poland during the pe-riod known as Stalinism, during which time the arts were dominated by social-realism, and artists were expected to proliferate official propaganda in their work.

In the post-war zeal and its faith in humanism, and aided by her pronounced leftist leanings, Szapocznikow quickly found her place in this setting, becoming a prized artistic commodity and reaping government commissions, inclu-ding one for a monument celebrating Polish-Russian amity for the Palace of Arts and Culture in Warsaw. In 1955, as the communist regime weakened in Poland, artists enjoyed a greater degree of freedom. Szapocznikow almost immediately initited a more experimental approach in her practice, in line with the tendencies prevalent in the art world at that time. Interest in her work continued to rise in Poland and she was invited to take part in a number of exhibitions, including a solo show at Poland’s most prestigious art institution, the Zacheta Gallery in Warsaw in 1957.

In spite of her successes, in 1963 she decided to emigrate to Paris with her second husband, the famous graphic designer, Roman Cieslewicz. There, she was forced to begin anew, and cultivated her artistic career with great difficulty. Through a friendship with Pierre Restany, who had already developed an interest in her work while she was still in Poland, she circulated on the peripheries of the Nouveau Réalisme movement. But, like many of the female artists of that time, she would not live to see her work find wide international recognition. She experimented intensively, searching for her own means of expression while also trying to exhibit her work and solidify her place in the art world.

Having traversed a world war, three concentration camps homelessness, a cold war, and recurring ill health, her life came to an early end in 1973 as a result of breast cancer. With it, she left behind an exceptionally pioneering body of work, carving a truly individual language of experimental forms and materials from her very personal story.

Since her death several solo exhibitions of her work have been held: Alina Szapocznikow, 1926-1973, Zacheta Gal-lery, Warsaw (1998); Alina Szapocznikow, Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz (1975), and Alina Szapocznikow, 1926-1973, Tumeurs, Herbiers, Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, France (1973). Her work has also been exhibited posthumously in a number of institutional group shows, including: Les Promesses du passé, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); Seductive subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, USA (2010); Women Artists Biennale, Incheon, South Korea (2009); elles@centrepompidou. Women Artists in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2009); The Photographic Object, The Photographer’s Gallery, London, UK (2009); On Time, East Wing CollectionVIII, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, London, UK (2008); Art comes before gold, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2008); Documenta XII, Kas-sel, Germany (2007); Flesh at War with Enigma, Kunsthalle, Basel, Switzerland (2004); Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2002).

About the development of the artist’s oeuvre

Around 1955, after years of making sculptures that were a reflection of her classical arts training, Alina Szapocz-nikow began to gradually introduce deformations into her figural representations. Initially her choice of materials were rather traditional: plaster, wood, stone, cement, bronze, and clay; however, even in these choices, the artist approached materials in a way that was often contrary to their nature, resulting in elongated forms and an almost gravity-defying precariousness that would be a recurrent motif of her oeuvre. Increasingly, however, the artist turned towards an inventivity that was not only formal, but also material. By the early 1960s, she not only began to use readymade elements (often machine and car parts) in her sculptures, but she also began to use casts of female body parts, predominantly her own. Whereas figurations of the body had remained from the start an important element in her oeuvre, Szapocznikow’s introduction of actual casts of the body announced a vital development of her practice. Around 1964, she also ventured towards the choice of new and highly experimental materials such as poured polyurethane and polyester resins that had little known application in the world of art at the time. The shift would define the most remarkable and individual segment of her oeuvre.

Her relentless quest for the most contemporary form possible was both a response to her chosen medium – sculp-ture – and a struggle with how to keep it relevent in the historical moment in which she lived. Summing up her achievements with great self-awareness, Szapocznikow wrote: “[I am] nothing more than a sculptor looking at the bankruptcy of her vocation....I resolved to be aware of the times we live in....I create only ungainly objects.”1 In her hands, sculpture questioned its autonomous status and became a conglomeration of fragments, substitutes, multi-ples, and quotidian objects of use. The focal point of her interests remained throughout the body – its experiences and limitations. “I am convinced that among all the manifestations of perishability, the human body is the most sensitive; a single source of all joy, all pain and all truth,” the artist once said.2 In her later works, she gave voice to personal issues more and more clearly: the ambivalently sexualized and anguished experience of the female body (notably in her “Illuminated Lips”, “Dessert”, and “Fetish” series), recollections of the war and the Holocaust (notably in the series entitled “Souvenirs”, which incorporate photographs, including a mix of personal, media, and concentration camp images), and finally, a dramatic examination of the cancer that brings her life to a premature end (notably in the “Tumors” series). This exhibition will concentrate on the centrality of experiementation to Szapocznikow’s way of thinking and wor-king and her redefinition of sculptural practice as a result. A fully illustrated catalogue made in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York to be published to coincide with the exhibition.

The WIELS exhibition is organized as part of I, CULTURE, the International Cultural Programme of the Polish EU Presidency coordinated by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in cooperation with the Polish Institute in Brussels. With the support of BNP Paribas Fortis.

I, CULTURE is the International Cultural Programme of the Polish Presidency of the EU Council and the largest programme promoting Polish culture abroad ever implemented by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. The Polish Presi-dency offers a unique opportunity to communicate Poland’s message to the world. Almost 400 events are presented in 10 capitals in the European Union and around the world from July to December 2011. They introduce Poland as a modern and unique country with a rich and creative contemporary culture: the creative hub of Europe.

1 Szapocznikow, A. (April 1972), “Korzenie mego dzieła wyrastajz zawodu rzezbiarza (Mon oeuvre puise ses racines…)”, signed typescript. 2 Ibid.

Alina Szapocznikow - Select images

Trudny wiek (Difficult Age), 1956Patinated plaster189 x 59 x 38 cmMuzeum Sztuki w Łodzi

Goldfinger, 1965Gold patinated cement and car part 183 x 76 x 57 cmMuzeum Sztuki w Łodzi

Caprice-Monstre (Caprice-Monster), 1967Sponge, polyester resin, metal and electrical wiring 200 cm highThe Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/ Piotr Stanislawski

Kruzlowa (Macierzynstwo), (Madonna of Kruzlowa [Motherhood]), 1969Colored polyester resin, photographs and gauze42 x 52 x 18 cmPrivate Collection, Paris

Stèle (Stele), 1968Polyester resin and polyurethane foam 79 x 46 x 69 cmCollection Sabine Stanislawski

Lampe – bouche (Illuminated Lips), 1966Colored polyester resin, metal, and electrical wiringRanging from 28,5 to 45,5 cm highThe Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/ Piotr Stanislawski

Petit Dessert I (Small Dessert I), 1970-71Colored polyester resin and glass8 x 11 x 13 cmPrivate Collection, New York

Dessert III (Dessert III), 1971Colored polyester resin and porcelain base18 x 24 x 25 cmPrivate Collection, New York

Untitled, 1964Ink and felt-tip pen on paper31,2 x 23,4 cmMuseum of Modern Art, New York

From the series Paysage humain (Human Landscape), c. 1971-1972Watercolor and felt-tip pen on laid paper 29,3 x 20,6 cmThe Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/ Piotr Stanislawski

Alina Szapocznikow in Carrara at work on BelliesPhoto: Roger Gain for Elle, 1968The Alina Szapocznikow Archive/ Piotr Stanislawski/ National Museum of Krakow

Alina Szapocznikow posing in her studio with Naga, ca. 1961The Alina Szapocznikow Archive/ Piotr Stanislawski/ National Museum of Krakow

All courtesy © The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski, Paris

For more images and further informations about Alina Szapocznikow: http://www.artmuseum.pl/archiwa.php?l=1&a=1&skrot=0

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

ExhibitionSeptember 10, 2011 - January 08, 2012

OpeningSeptember 9, 2011

Opening hoursWed – Sun 11:00 – 18:00 Late opening every first and third Wednesday of the month 11:00 – 21:00Mon – Tue closed

Tickets7€ - 0€Free: Every first Wenesday of the month

Free guided toursEvery Sunday at 15:00 in French and Dutch, included in your admission

AccessTrain Brussels MidiTram 82 - 97, stop WielsBus 50 - 49, stop WielsCar Ring Exit 17 ‘Anderlecht industrie’ - ‘Centre/Paepsem’

Current and future exhibitionsYto Barrada (Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the year 2011), Riffs, 24.09 – 31.12.2011 Rosemarie Trockel, Spring 2012 Daan van Golden, Spring 2012Young Belgian Art Scene, Summer 2012Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Autumn 2012

Press contactsangie.vandycke@wiels.orgM +32 (0)486 680 070T +32 (0)2 340 00 51

WIELSAvenue Van Volxemlaan3541190 BrusselsT+32 (0)2 340 00 50F+32 (0)2 340 00 59

WIELS thanks its partners for their support in 2011

Polska Prezydencjaw Radzie Unii Europejskiej2011