Alina Szapocznikow

The publication is published on the occasion of the solo exhibition "Alina Szapocznikow. Body Languages" at the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg. It combines, among others, 13 short texts by reknown scholars on her work and the medium of sculpture, addressing key topics as casting, erotic objects, memory, fragmented bodies and plasticity. Alina Szapocznikow (1926 Kalisz, PL - 1973 Passy, FR) is one of the outstanding female sculptors of the 20th century. The central focus of Szapocznikow's works is on the human body, through which she uncompromisingly thematizes the fragility of existence and the paradoxes of life. Her untiring investigation of unconventional sculptural practices, materials, and forms assures her a status as one of the pioneering female sculptors who-alongside Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse- made fundamental contributions to an expansion of the sculptural. The vocabulary of the sculptor includes direct body casts of "erogenous zones" - mouths, breasts and bellies - which she develops further in serial formations, sometimes modelling them, whether as seductive lamps, marble belly folds that stimulate the sense of touch, cyborg-like figures or skin-like shells. Traces of memory run through her entire oeuvre: in addition to memorial designs in remembrance of the Holocaust, she conceives her Souvenir-series, in which - as with the tumor objects - she integrates photographs and newspaper clippings that shimmer through the polyester and keep the memory alive. Today Alina Szapocznikow's work is just as visionary as at the time of its creation.

Already during her lifetime, Alina Szapocznikow enjoyed widespread recognition in her native Poland. Today, she is considered one of the most important and innovative post-war artists in Poland. Alina Szapocznikow's reception in the context of international artistic discourse received a fundamental impulse through the exhibition Awkward Objects (2009) at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Institutional solo exhibitions followed (selection): 'Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972', WIELS Centre d'art contemporain, Brüssel, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011-2013) , 'Alina Szapocznikow: Du dessin à la sculpture', Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013); 'Alina Szapocznikow: Body Traces', Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2014); 'Alina Szapocznikow: Human Landscapes', The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, und Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden (2017/2018).For the second time in Germany, the exhibition at Kunstmuseum Ravensburg offers the rare opportunity to get to know the work of Alina Szapocznikow.