Traumas & Tumours: Essential Alina Szapocznikow

szapocznikow-trudny-wiek-kol.jpg, default, Alina Szapocznikow with her sculpture ‘Difficult Age’, photo: Łódź Museum of Art archive; Alina Szapocznikow, ‘Difficult Age’, 1956. A piece from the

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16th May 2026 marks the centennial of Alina Szapocznikow’s birth. Although the artist died before the age of 50, throughout her two-decade career, she went down in history as one of the most significant Polish and European sculptors of the 20th century. Here we present ten of her most important works.

‘Friendship’ (Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship), 1954

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Alina Szapocznikow, ‘Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship’, DESA Unicum, Warsaw, photo: Sławomir Kamiński / AG

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Such were the times. One could withdraw from artistic life and spend years creating only for oneself, as Maria Jarema did, or remain expatriated, as Józef Czapski did. However, numerous artists, such as Andrzej Wróblewski and Wojciech Fangor, pinned their hopes on the communist system of the Polish People’s Republic to create a just social order, and they consequently decided to bite the bullet and adopt the aesthetic of socialist realism.

Such was the case of Alina Szapocznikow, who began her art education in Prague directly after World War II and concluded it in Paris in 1950. Afterwards, she decided to return to her home country and strive to obtain the available commissions. One of them was the competition for a Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship. Although Szapocznikow’s work didn’t win, it’s her monument that, in 1955, was placed in the main hall of the Palace of Culture and Science, back then still bearing the name of Joseph Stalin.

The monumental bronze sculpture depicting two men embracing and holding a furled banner remained there until the end of the Polish People’s Republic, thus outliving its author. In the liquidation protocol from May 1992, it was valued at only 40,000 old Polish złoty (with a teacher’s salary at the time equalling around 3,000,000 old złoty) and deemed ‘unsuitable for further exploitation as a result of long-term use’. A few years later, the monument disappeared without a trace. Journalists Dorota Jarecka and Katarzyna Bielas found it in the course of an investigation on the estate of Zbigniew Bogusz, who had disassembled the piece in the 1990s and was given it as payment for his work. It turned out that, when the monument was removed from the Palace, it didn’t fit through the doorway, so it was stripped of the huge banner along with the arms of the worker and the soldier holding it. The incomplete figures suddenly assumed an entirely different character: without the propaganda prop, the gesture of two young men embracing seemed more tender and, if not homoerotic, actually friendly.

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Alina Szapocznikow with the clay project of the first version of the monument to Polish-soviet friendship © Piotr Stanisławski

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Nowadays, Friendship is located on the upper floor of the recently raised Museum of Modern Art, gazing at its original home through a panoramic window. It’s probably Poland’s most famous sculptural vestige, our post-Soviet Nike of Samothrace. And it’s exactly because it had been forgotten for years, written off, ruthlessly dismembered, then bought at an auction for a king’s ransom that the sculpture began to function as a truly touching monument, not to Polish-Soviet ‘friendship’ but to difficult history, conflicts over its symbols, the iconoclastic drive of the transformation era and the psychological working through of the communist epoch.

The fragmented body constitutes one of the key motifs in Szapocznikow’s mature works. The mutilated Friendship, made before the artist reached 30, fits unusually well with those later pieces.

‘Difficult Age’, 1956

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Alina Szapocznikow, ‘Difficult Age’, 1954–1956, photo: © Courtesy The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow / Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris

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Friendship, along with the entire socialist realist chapter of Szapocznikow’s oeuvre, was marginalised for years. The story of her art would begin with two other sculptures: First Love, from 1954, and Difficult Age, from 1956. The latter, a naked figure of a teenage girl sculpted in gypsum and patinated, has little in common with the female bodies – or rather their fetishised fragments – which we know from Szapocznikow’s later works. Standing a little astride, erect, with one hand on her hip, she’s almost boyish in comparison, as the art historian Anna Markowska observed.

Her slim silhouette – nearly 190 cm tall, with narrow hips, small breasts, hair tied in a ponytail and neck as long as that of Parmigianino’s Mannerist Madonna (Madonna with the Long Neck) – retains quite a lot of the strength of socialist realist monumental sculptures of workers; however, it’s stripped of any attributes defining her social role. Suspended between childhood and adulthood as well as between the monumentality of socialist realism and the art of the October thaw, which leans towards the personal and the everyday, Difficult Age conveys with perfect accuracy its historical moment: the tangible wind of change following the death of Stalin.

Simultaneously, it remains thoroughly universal. The girl’s bellicose pose contrasts with the uncertainty perceptible in her facial expression, and her unnaturally elongated proportions convey with perfect accuracy the experience of the body in that ‘difficult age’, which we all remember from our own lives. When hormones seem to be taking over, limbs appear to us as weirdly uncoordinated and out of proportion, and rebellion mixes with anxiety. Even the material – fragile gypsum that resembles bronze only on the surface, owing to patina, perfectly complements the message of the sculpture, the silent monument to the generation of ‘younger brothers (and sisters) of Columbuses’ [Columbuses were the generation of Polish writers born in or around the year 1920, whose formative years coincided with World War II, trans.] as well as to adolescence as such.

‘Exhumed’, 1955–1956

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Alina Szapocznikow, ‘Exhumed’, 1957, bronze, 66 × 75 × 39 cm, from the collection of the Museum of Independence in Warsaw, photo: Jewish Historical Institute

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Alina Szapocznikow, "Ekshumowany", 1957, brąz, 66 × 75 × 39 cm, kol. Muzeum Niepodległości w Warszawie, fot. Żydowski Instytut Historyczny

When World War II broke out, Alina Szapocznikow was just 13 years old. She grew up in ghettos and concentration camps: she and her family were sent to Auschwitz, then to Bergen-Belsen, and finally to the Theresienstadt. She almost never spoke about these experiences, ‘avoided discussing the topic almost obsessively’, according to critic Aleksander Wojciechowski. In her works, too, war trauma resides as if on the margins. However, there are moments when it returns, both in the artist’s early works and in those she created towards the end of her life. One of the most powerful examples is Exhumed, made in the mid-1950s.

The sitting bronze cast figure is without arms and fragments of legs; her facial features are completely blurred, her texture rough and expressive. It resembles an ancient monument unearthed after centuries of oblivion, or perhaps remains, excavated from the ruins of Pompeii, of an unidentified person whom death surprised in the midst of some mundane activity and whom volcanic ash preserved in the same pose for millennia to come.

At the same time, Exhumed is a kind of monument commemorating László Rajka, a Hungarian activist murdered in 1949, then exhumed and vindicated seven years later during the revolution of 1956. Significantly, however, it wasn’t until after the piece was completed that the artist gave it its current title, thereby endowing it with a secondary interpretive meaning. It’s as if her confrontation with the memories of war much more dramatic in form than, for instance, A Monument for the Burned City from 1954, proved too difficult for Szapocznikow and required repression enacted through the change of context.

‘Goldfinger’, 1965

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Alina Szapocznikow, ‘Goldfinger’, 1965, © Piotr Stanisławski / Łódź Museum of Art

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Sex, violence, absurd gadgets and fast cars, shaken, mixed and served in the tone of light entertainment – such is the golden recipe for a film about Agent 007 from the times of Sean Connery to the present, with short intervals of more down-to-earth and emotionally charged episodes in the eras of Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig. In one of the most acclaimed films in the James Bond series, Goldfinger from 1964, the trigger of the eponymous antagonist’s kills (in a medically dubious way) one of ‘Bond’s girls’, covering her entire body with gold paint. Lying in a hotel bed, shimmering with gold from head to toes, dead and naked, Jill is one of the most memorable images of a fetishised female body in the popular culture of the 1960s. The scene, also depicted on the film’s poster, clearly made a strong impression on Alina Szapocznikow as well, since shortly after the film’s release, she created a sculpture titled Goldfinger.

Stumps of women’s legs are tied together with a wishbone of a car and coated with gold. The structure, made shortly after the artist’s permanent move to Paris in 1963, contains not only all the aforementioned ingredients of a Bond film formula but also those of Szapocznikow’s art of that decade – the female body in a fragmented, fetishised form, grotesque, and allusions to popular culture.

‘Multiple Portrait (Fourfold)’, 1965–1967

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Alina Szapocznikow, ‘Multiple Portrait’, 1967, photo: Łódź Museum of Art

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Moving on from a full-body representation of the female figure – as in First Love or Difficult Age – to working with her own image, Szapocznikow began using casts of her own body parts, simultaneously employing materials that were then completely new and went beyond the sculpture tradition. She started to combine refined, classic monument materials – bronze and granite – with multi-colour polyester casts, from one resembling stone to a veristically flesh-coloured, red-lipped one.

What’s important is that this self-portrait only features the part of the face from the tip of the nose down, and the shoulders are turned upside down. Together, they create, to quote the critic Krystyna Czerni, ‘a beautiful, winged fan made of shoulders and half-faces’. Multiplication additionally blurs the features’ individuality, which more closely resembles a mask, perhaps even a death mask – in fact, the first version of Multiple Portrait was reproduced on the pages of the Współczesność (Contemporaneity) magazine under the title Rzeźba Nagrobna (Gravestone Sculpture).

It’s especially the omission of eyes that reinforces the tension between revealing oneself through a faithful cast of one’s body on the one hand and hiding behind a mask on the other. In the book Portret Wielokrotny Dzieła Aliny Szapocznikow (Multiple Portrait of Alina Szapocznikow’s Oeuvre) by critic Agata Jakubowska, she refers to this very sculpture, writing that the omission is a kind of agile dodge, since, after all:

The gaze is considered one of the main elements that construct the relationship of power in the depictions of women. In extreme cases, women […] either look away completely […], which allows the viewer to contemplate their bodies unobstructedly, or – conversely – they look directly at him, making him feel awkward as a result.

‘Lampe-Bouche’, 1966

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Alina Szapocznikow, ‘Illuminated Lips I’, from 1966, coloured polyester, electric light 28 x 52 cm. Courtesy of Piotra Stanisławskiego and Galerie Gisela Capitain GmbH, Cologne, photo: WIELS

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Alina Szapocznikow, "Usta iluminowane I", od 1966, poliester barwny, światło elektryczne 28 x 52 cm. Dzięki uprzejmości Piotra Stanisławskiego i Galerie Gisela Capitain GmbH, Kolonia., fot. WIELS

In Szapocznikow’s subsequent works, identification is even more difficult the casts become more and more fragmentary. Placed on elongated ‘stems’, they initially resemble flowers until they transform into functional, utilitarian forms. Starting from 1966, she created subsequent pieces titled Lamps objects from the borderline between sculpture and eccentric, erotic design, in which lips, breasts, or buttocks cast in polyester resin serve as lampshades, illuminated with soft light shining through the half-transparent material.

Here, the fragment of the body becomes an industrially manufactured fetish (Szapocznikow even planned to produce and sell her lamps on a mass scale) while also remaining tied to the person – the lips and breasts aren’t imagined but ‘taken off of’ the artist herself and the women from her circle, including, for instance, Catherine Deneuve. We witness once again the tension characteristic of Szapocznikow between the private experience of the body and its formatting and commodification by mass culture.

At the same time, the sculptor uses grotesque skillfully, without allowing her objects to become mere fetishes. According to Krystyna Czerni, Szapocznikow’s flirtation with commercial kitsch contained a note of tragedy. The critic writes: ‘In the functionalism of these sad gadgets there’s self-irony, humiliated narcissism, and the entire knowledge of the instrumentality to which both art and the body are sometimes condemned’.

Szapocznikow also intended to launch other works, based on casts of the stomach, into serial production. She cast those in gypsum or sculpted them on a monumental scale in marble (Big Bellies, 1968), in which cases they became almost abstract, resembling Barbara Hepworth’s organic forms. The 1968 piece Belly-Cushions, a cast of a body fragment of Arianne Raoul-Auval, the then-fiancée of Roland Topor, was to form the basis of a series of mass-produced objects, devised as utensils for homes and kindergartens.

‘Krużlowa’, 1969

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Alina Szapocznikow, ‘Krużlowa’ (Motherhood), 1969, assemblage: coloured polyester, photographs, gauze, 42 x 52 x 18 cm. Courtesy of Société de l’Apostolat Catholique (Pères Pallotins), Paris, photo: WIELS

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Alina Szapocznikow, "Krużlowa" (Macierzyństwo), 1969, asamblaż: poliester barwny, fotografie, gaza, 42 x 52 x 18 cm. Dzięki uprzejmości Société de l'Apostolat Catholique (Pères Pallotins), Paryż., fot. WIELS

The year 1968 marked one of the major shifts in Alina Szapocznikow’s life. Before the student rebellion broke out in Paris, she followed the events of the Polish March ’68 from Paris. The anti-semitic witch-hunt was probably the ultimate factor behind her decision to give up the thought of returning to her home country and to remain in Paris permanently.

Alongside the political drama, a personal one was unfolding. In 1968, the artist was diagnosed with breast cancer. As a result, the language of Szapocznikow’s sculptures began to change visibly. She still employed artificial materials and casts of her own body fragments. Still, she endowed them with a different form than in the case of her fetish objects – lamps with illuminated lips or cups with breasts instead of ice-cream scoops. Rather, these fragments were now sunken into, as well as absorbed and trapped by, the material.

A breakthrough piece in this context is Krużlowa, a sculpture gifted to Father Józef Sadzik, an important figure among Polish expatriates in Paris. Here, for the first time, the artist used religious iconography, employing the image of the eponymous Our Lady of Krużlowa – a wooden Gothic figure in the style of the so-called Beautiful Madonnas. Reproductions of the idealised Madonna face, viewed from multiple angles, are sunken into shapeless polyurethane forms strung together. Casts of the artist’s breasts accompany them. In this piece, embodiment is endowed with a different dimension than in the previous ones – the figure of the Madonna with the Child reorients our attention from female sexuality to the experience of motherhood.

In 1952, together with Ryszard Stanisławski, the artist adopted a son, Piotr. As a result of an illness she suffered a few years prior, she couldn’t get pregnant. For the sculptor, who – as we know from her letters to Stanisławski – was grieving the impossibility of giving birth to and nursing a child, the transformed image of the Madonna, Western culture’s paragon of womanhood, attained a particularly powerful quality.

‘Tumours Personified’, 1971

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Alina Szapocznikow, ‘Tumors Personified’, 1971, photo: WIELS

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Alina Szapocznikow, "Nowotwory uosobione", 1971., fot. WIELS

Several years after the various Multiple Portraits and the series of works featuring casts of small body fragments, Szapocznikow once more took up self-portraits. This time, however, she didn’t hide behind a mask but rather reproduced a cast of her own head, which she often distorted to a significant degree. After her cancer diagnosis, her work with her own body attained a new dimension.

Subsequent versions of Tumours began appearing from late 1968 onward. These abstract forms resemble tumours running rampant throughout one’s organism; they give the impression of being half-living and capable of proliferation. The first versions comprised embedded photographs; eventually, the series culminated in a dozen or so disfigured tumour self-portraits, messily scattered on a thin layer of gravel, based on casts of the artist’s own head. Melting them with her own face, Szapocznikow tried to reconcile herself, in a way, to the changes occurring in her organism – perhaps even to accept them as a part of her own subjectivity.

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Alina Szapocznikow, ‘Alina’s Funeral’, a piece from the exhibition ‘Szapocznikow: Osobista’ (Szapocznikow: Personal) at the National Museum in Kraków, 2026, photo: Jakub Włodek / AW

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Her further works contain the bitter truth about the passage of time, as well as the artist’s awareness that she probably didn’t have a lot of it left. With each new version of Tumours, the images become less sharp. Soon after, Szapocznikow had to face a relapse of the illness. The second one sadly proved deadly: she passed away in March 1973.

A particularly powerful expression of making peace with the oncoming death is the piece, from 1970, still titled Alina’s Funeral. In it, the artist sank not only photographs of Szapocznikow and her loved ones into the material, but also everyday objects – scraps of bandages, crumpled newspapers, jeans and a shirt.

‘Photosculptures’, 1971

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Michelangelo believed that his role as a sculptor was to notice a form already existing within a block of marble and to set it free with a chisel through a methodical stripping away of what’s redundant. Although she was a modern artist through and through, Szapocznikow was also, in a way, an artistic heiress to the Renaissance master. She, too, would notice forms imprisoned in shapeless matter (though not necessarily of the traditional kind).

A moment of illumination came when the artist was in the process of ‘releasing’ one of her most unique sculptures from a block of marble – Rolls-Royce, a realistic depiction of the luxury car. During the arduous processing of the stone mass, she realised that, at the same time, she was unconsciously creating many other potential sculptures while mechanically chewing gum. As she noted:

As I took such bizarre forms from my mouth, I suddenly became aware of an extraordinary collection of abstract sculptures passing between my teeth. All one would have to do is photograph and enlarge my chewed discoveries to put the fact of a sculptural creation face-to-face. Chew well, look around you. Art inhabits the space between dreams and the everyday.

The artist conveyed these discoveries in a series of 20 photographs. Subsequent chewed-up forms are sometimes laid flat, but more often they hang dramatically from the edges of surfaces, creating expressive figures that sometimes resemble Szapocznikow’s early works, such as Exhumed or her design for the Monument of the Heroes of Warsaw. On such a micro-scale, beginning with a kind of play as a stepping stone from working on a larger project, Szapocznikow managed to introduce into her sculpture an element of accidental, uncontrolled expression as if straight from Art Informel painting – something that would seem impossible in her chosen medium.

‘Piotr’, from the series ‘Herbarium’, 1972

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Alina Szapocznikow, ‘Piotr’ from the series ‘Herbarium’, 1972, photo: National Museum in Kraków

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The motif of motherhood – this time not in the context of the unfulfilled longing conveyed by Krużlowa, but rather in Szapocznikow’s relationship with her son, Piotr – returns in the achievement crowning the artist’s career: the series titled Herbarium. Here, the sculptor employs body casts once again – and she once again changes their context entirely. She begins with Self-Portrait, Herbarium to quickly redirect her attention, this time not to her own body, and not even – by way of exception – to a female body, but towards none other than her son. In accordance with the title, the casts of subsequent body fragments are treated like plants collected for a herbarium – pressed into flat shapes and attached to the surface, in this case to wooden planks painted dark brown.

Subjected to these dramatic deformations is mainly the boy’s head. Just as in Krużlowa, Szapocznikow employs religious iconography here. The full-body, thin silhouette of Piotr, accompanying subsequent fragments of Herbarium, resembles the slumped body of Christ, as if taken straight from a scene of the deposition from the cross on a late Gothic altarpiece. The twelfth piece in the series is known as The Head of Christ. In this version, twigs are arranged around the head, resembling a crown of thorns. Agata Jakubowska goes as far as to put forward the claim that the whole series, consisting of 14 parts, may have been conceived by the artist as a form of depicting the Way of the Cross. She also connects The Head of Christ to the Shroud of Turin, which was attracting significant media attention at the time, owing to the first physicochemical analysis it had undergone not long before.

The piece, held by the Centre for Dialogue in Paris, demonstrates the scope of Szapocznikow’s artistic capabilities. With equal skill, the artist employed contemporary pop-cultural contexts as well as biblical motifs explored in European art for centuries, bringing out the same depth and richness in both.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

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