Alina Szapocznikow

Autobiography in Fragments

11 June – 5 September 2026

Zurich, Bahnhofstrasse

Opening Reception

Thursday 11 June, 6 – 8pm

Dates

11 June – 5 September 2026

Location

Zurich, Bahnhofstrasse Directions

Materials

Press Release (En)

Artwork Inquiry

For Zurich Art Weekend 2026, our gallery on Bahnhofstrasse celebrates the centenary of the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow’s birth with an autobiographical exhibition.

Opening alongside Galerie Loevenbruck’s exhibition in Paris, ‘Alina Szapocznikow. Autobiography in Fragments’ is a celebration across two cities, foregrounding the artist’s explosively inventive but brief career, which spanned from the mid 1940s until the early 1970s.

These two complementary exhibitions will together feature a work from each year that Szapocznikow was active to reveal the full expressive force of the artist’s practice, which reimagined sculpture as an intimate register of lived experience. Born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1926, Alina Szapocznikow survived internment in concentration camps during the Holocaust as a teenager. Immediately after the Second World War, she moved first to Prague (1945) and then to Paris, studying sculpture at the École des Beaux Arts (1947).

Szapocznikow’s earliest work falls into the realm of classical sculptural representations of the human form in static and naturalist poses. These early works in stone on view in Zurich are attentive observations of the anatomical proportions and volumes of the body, reflected in plaster busts such as ‘Autoportret (Self-Portrait)’ (1948). She returned to Poland in 1951, and following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the restrictions that had tightly governed artistic expression in the Soviet Union eased and Szapocznikow’s practice underwent a dramatic transformation. She abandoned mimetic representation and began to explore figurative abstraction, creating sculptures such as ‘Kwiato-owoc (Flower-fruit)’ (1957 – 1958) and ‘Forma II (Form II)’ (1959). By the 1960s, Szapocznikow had radically reconceptualized sculpture as a record not only of her memory but of her own body. She rejected the body as a whole, integral entity, instead fragmenting the human figure in order to foreground its vulnerability and instability. By 1962, she began to use imprints of her own body and experimented with unconventional materials such as polyester resin and polyurethane foam, working in parallel with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Tetsumi Kudo, Eva Hesse and Paul Thek to transform the visual language of postwar sculpture. In 1966, illumination would become a signature element in Szapocznikow’s oeuvre, and she created numerous functional sculptures in polyester resin: glowing female lips extending from elongated stemlike bases, wired as lamps. The utilitarian function of these objects contradicts their natural shape and glowing orporeality. Trapped between household commodities and bodily forms, Szapocznikow’s lamps possess an inherent contradiction that seems designed to discomfit. In 1969, Szapocznikow was diagnosed with breast cancer, which would ultimately take her life in 1973. Her

diagnosis inspired the Tumors (1969 – 1972)—small lumps of resin that gave form to the masses growing inside her body, in which she buried photographs, newspaper clippings and gauze. References to the Holocaust appeared in her work for the first time in her Souvenirs (1967 – 1971) series, which embedded photographs within translucent layers of resin. ‘Pamiatka I (Souvenir I)’ (1971) fuses a holiday snapshot of Szapocznikow as a girl with the face of a female concentration camp victim, integrating the time before, during and after the war while merging individual and collective memories. Like Szapocznikow’s casts of body parts, the photograph has an indexical relationship with the subject—a simultaneous record of presence and absence. In the last years of her practice, Szapocznikow repeatedly—almost obsessively—cast her own body and the bodies of her loved ones. In her Herbier (Herbarium) series, represented here by the arresting ‘Herbier bleu I (Blue Herbarium I)’ (1972), skin-like polyester casts of fragments of her and her son’s body are splayed out like scientific specimens or burial shrouds. As in her oneiric Human Landscapes (1971 – 1972) drawings, the sensual volume of her earlier sculptures collapses into fragile, flattened forms that foreground the body’s impermanence. Looking back on her practice in a text written in 1972, she referred to her work as ‘awkward object’s’: ‘I try to fix the fleeting moments of life, its paradoxes and absurdity.’ Although she described herself first and foremost as a sculptor, Szapocznikow produced more than six hundred drawings and monotypes that were integral to her sculptural practice; the works on paper interspersed throughout the exhibition are stand-alone works that amplify and echo her sculptural practice in terms of their composition and texture.

A tribute to the artist and her ceaseless experimentation, ‘Autobiography in Fragments’ attests to Szapocznikow’s ability to capture the human body in all its vulnerability, fragility and resilience. This two-part presentation coincides with the exhibition ‘Szapocznikow. Personal’ at Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie in Krakow, Poland (20 March – 23 August 2026).

‘I am convinced that of all the manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body is the most fragile, the only source of all joy, of all pain and of all truth.’ —Alina Szapocznikow

Installation Views

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To Exalt the Ephemeral:
Alina Szapocznikow, 1962 – 1972

Tracing a body of work by Alina Szapocznikow from 1962 to 1972, this book by Hauser & Wirth Publishers considers pivotal turning points in the Polish artist’s life and career. Beautifully packaged, this title eveals the full expressive potential of Szapocznikow’s pioneering work through the material innovations she made during the last decade of her life.

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About the Artist

Alina Szapocznikow

Born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1926, Alina Szapocznikow survived internment in concentration camps during the Holocaust as a teenager. Immediately after the war, she moved first to Prague and then to Paris, studying sculpture at the École des Beaux Arts. In 1951, suffering from tuberculosis, she was forced to return to Poland, where she expanded her practice. When the Polish government loosened controls over creative freedom following Stalin’s death in 1952, Szapocznikow moved into figurative abstraction and then a pioneering form of representation. By the 1960s, she was radically re-conceptualizing sculpture as an intimate record not only of her memory, but also of her own body.

In 1962, Szapocznikow experienced a breakthrough when she began to cast her own body in plaster. Her first work with this approach, ‘Noga (Leg)’, 1962 depicts the artist’s right leg—a very public statement on the human corpus as vehicle of pleasure, liberation, illness, death, and decomposition. She spoke of this turn in her development: ‘Haunted by the increasingly academic nature of abstract art, and at the same time, partly out of my spirit of contradiction and partly perhaps out of some artistic exhibitionism, I made a cast of my own leg and an assemblage of casts of my face… Fortunately we believe that in art everything has been already, so nothing has been yet.’

Szapocznikow was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1969, a turn of events that shaped her later sculptural and photographic efforts. In a series of sculptures titled ‘Tumors,’ made of resin, gauze, crumpled newspapers, and photographs, the artist gave form to the anxiety and existential challenges of illness. Szapocznikow’s final works express her pointed desire to engage with something deeper and ineffable, physical and psychological, the symptoms of bodily experiences and the traces of what we leave behind. She wrote, ‘Despite everything, I persist in trying to fix in resin the traces of our body: I am convinced that of all the manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of all joy, all suffering, and all truth.’

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