This is not actually a face, just casts of its lower part, multiplied. Each of them has a different tint – from nearly black, through navy blue, to skin-like pink. Each of them is framed by an inverted cast of shoulders, which resemble wings that look as if they were lifting up to the sky, higher and higher. They are, however, held to the ground by the stone on which they are set. The partly smooth, and partly rough stone evokes female breasts.
In Multiple Portrait, Alina Szapocznikow engages in a subversive game with the classic bust theme, creating a very distant take on this traditional sculptural form. The marble base merely insinuates female shapes, while in the lieu of the head, there is a strange composition, reminiscent of fragments of human body – shoulders and face – that defies the rules of anatomy. The body is, then, used as a matter, which the artist easily modifies, deforms, multiplies, and rearranges into new, unexpected forms.
In early 1960s, the artist used plaster and polyester resin casts of her own (and not only) body parts – legs, lips, faces, breasts – and reconfigured them into new forms. The nearly transparent lips cast in polyester resin were turned into lampshades, while pink, semitranslucent breasts, piled up like ice cream scoops in a cup – into irresistible parfaits. Legs grew out of stone blocks. Half-faces became masks. Another recurring theme was female belly, cast in polyester resin in different colours. The artist even intended to release them into mass production, as pillows. In 1968, she sculpted the marble Big Bellies (Wielkie Brzuchy) – two monumental bellies placed on top of one another.
Nevertheless, this pop-art-like multiplication escaped banality. All of these body operations were founded on the artist's personal experience. As a young woman, she was exposed to the barbaric reality of concentration camps. She also went through a years-long struggle with a tumor – in 1969 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died prematurely at the age of 47. Izabela Kowalczyk inquired: