Art News

Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972 at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre

BRUSSELS.- WIELS Contemporary Art Centre premiered 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,