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This summer, Hauser & Wirth Somerset celebrates the opening of our Education Lab, a global partnership between our learning and green teams, open from Saturday 3 June 2023 until Monday 1 January 2024.

For our first solo exhibition devoted to Alina Szapocznikow since undertaking representation of the artist’s estate in May 2018, we focus on the last ten working years of Alina's life, from 1962 to 1972. The ‘To Exalt the Ephemeral’, comes from the 1972 manifesto that she wrote, summing up her goals and challenges as a sculptor.

The exhibition begins with ‘Noga’ (‘Leg’) her first body cast, ‘Untitled’, the first cast of her mouth. It then moves through the scope of her experiments with different materials: bronze, resin, cement, car parts, polyurethane, and photography. The exhibition displays her interest in Pop Art and Surrealism, as well as her formal investigations of sculpture. The show concludes with the ‘Herbier’ series—the last series she produced, and casts of her own face that function as death masks. The exhibition is organized by explorations of themes, and materials, rather than a direct chronology.

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to announce its worldwide representation of The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow in collaboration with Piotr Stanislawski, the artist’s son, and Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris.

Alina Szapocznikow is best known for her sculptural explorations of the existential strangeness and fragility of the human body. In 1969, she began exploring a quixotic idea about other kinds of bodies: the gaudy body politic of the American Dream—as Szapocznikow, a Polish Jew living then in Paris, saw it—and the body of a Rolls-Royce, an apotheosis of the wealth and power the United States represented for her.