The online edition of French daily Le Monde has published a glowing critique of current exhibition of works by famed Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow on at the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre
Sculpture Undone presents a wide range of roughly 100 works created by the renowned Polish artist between 1955-1972. The show is one of the first major solo presentations of the artist’s work outside of Poland, concentrating on her most experimental period in the 1960s and 1970s This major event, the fruit of an exceptional collaboration initiated by WIELS and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 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 47. 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.
The 15th September edition of Le Monde published an article on the life of the artist, along with a review of her work and the current exhibition, paying particular note to the physicality of her work and the vivid elements of destruction and degradation of the flesh:
Yet it can no longer be enough to taper and polish the exterior volumes. It must penetrate inside, make it feel the joints and muscle machine, the tensions of the nerves, the beating of the blood, the body, sex, life - but a living threat, ephemeral, fatal.
Suddenly, without hesitation , she grabbed all the resources that are now available. She aggregates engine parts to molded and cast members. She discovered plastics and put them together with rags, pieces of clothing and glass containers. Resin was used to create breasts, mouths or hands, tenderly colored, but easily torn, deformed , blooms planted like heads on pikes. With these pieces, she composed still lifes that were sarcastic, a game of massacre. From1967, she took photographs of faces and naked bodies, she drowned them in resin, obtaining mummified, twisted forms. It is impossible not to report in his obsession with physical destruction and her experiences in the camps which she refused to talk about.