Andrea
Rosen Gallery is pleased to announce Alina Szapocznikow, the gallery’s
inaugural solo-exhibition of the artist since beginning to represent her Estate
in 2014.
On the
heels of a major international traveling retrospective, this exhibition
presents a meticulously assembled group of major figurative sculptures from the
1960s and 1970s. Ardently concentrating on life-size freestanding figures,
these works represent some of the artist’s most significant bodies of work,
lent from museums and private collections from around the world.
Szapocznikow,
over the distilled course of fifteen years, developed a profound pioneering
vision and formal language tensioned between lust and sexuality, and the threat
of destruction. Embodying this dichotomy, her work contains an intense
vividness of life that perhaps can be drawn to her personal history, surviving a
youth in concentration camps; like a number of artists of her time, such as
Paul Thek and Hannah Wilke, who came out of intensity, there is an incredible
rigor and vibrance driven from the force of life.
After
representing Poland in the 1962 Venice Biennale, she moved to Paris, fully
formed, at a historically vital time, when artists from Marcel Duchamp to Yves
Klein were simultaneously developing pivotal territories propelled out of
Formalism. Evoking characteristics of Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme and Pop Art,
her works embraced both material rigor as well as her own deeply personal
psychology, leading her to create “awkward objects”—visceral sculptures that
unravel gravity and composition—to explore what she saw as the most vulnerable
of all ephemeral manifestations, the human body.
At once
seductive and unsettling, Szapocznikow’s work is often made from direct
impressions and casts of body parts, each an attempt to fix the traces of the
body and record the fleeting moments and absurd paradoxes of life. She infused
a completely new set of materials: those she concocted and heavily documented
in the laboratory of her studio—such as tinted polyester resin and polyurethane
expanding foam—creating a post-human form of lamps that used casts made
directly from her lips, to every day resources—pantyhose, newspaper clippings,
photographs, with straw and resin, grass and foam—resulting in distinctly
radical hybrids of the organic and inorganic.
While so
significant in her time, Szapocznikow is now widely regarded as one of the most
prominent figures in post-war Poland and Paris. Linking the intensely personal
to our greater humanity, her work, a vessel for memory and formal innovation,
singly holds the capacity to teach and unravel a multitude of historical threads
that tell the story of the past sixty years.
Alina
Szapocznikow was born in 1926 in Kalisz, Poland. After surviving three
concentration camps during WWII, she trained at studios in Prague and the École
des Beaux-arts in Paris. She first began showing her work in 1950 and held her
first two-person show at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, in 1957.
Szapocznikow, along with two other artists, was selected to represent Poland at
the Venice Biennale in 1962. A year later, she moved to Paris, where she
continued to live until her untimely death in 1973 at the age of 47.
Her work
has been the subject of major survey exhibitions and retrospectives worldwide,
including the first comprehensive retrospective outside of Poland, traveling to
the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; WIELS
Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus
(2011-2013); and a major survey exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris (2012) and Tel Aviv Museum (2014). Additional solo exhibitions include:
Bonniers Konsthall, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Basel, Camden Arts Centre, London, and the
National Museum of Warsaw. Recent group shows this summer include “THEM” at the
Schinkel Pavillion; Danh Vo and Caroline Bourgeois’s “The Slip of the Tongue,”
at Punta Della Dogana, and Massimiliono Gioni’s “La Grand Madre,” at Fondazione
Nicola Trussardi. Her work is in the public collections of the Centre Pompidou,
Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia
Museum Art; and Tate, London, as well as numerous institutions across Poland
and Western Europe.
Venue name:
Andrea Rosen Gallery
Address:
525 W 24th St , New York
Cross
street: between Tenth and Eleventh Aves
Opening
hours: Tue–Sat 10am–6pm
Transport:
Subway: C, E to 23rd St
Website: AndreaRosenGallery
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