Alina Szapocznikow
On an erect pink penis sits the lower part of a face with glaring red, kissable lips, as if held in place by a swan’s neck. Where eyes and nose should be, a yawning orifice reveals a lightbulb, which illuminates a mouth, a chin, and two green, gleaming circles merging in the background, evidently representing two large pupils. The ensemble is vaulted by a kind of scalp—a rosy, shimmering membrane that morbidly crowns the composition. Sculpture-Lampe XI is a handy sculpture by the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow: It also serves as a lamp. The work dates from 1970, when Szapocznikow, who was born in 1926, was working against death by means of her erotic-macabre objects. Not just against her own death—one year earlier, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, which, after eating through her bones, would eventually defeat her in 1973—but also against the suffering she endured throughout her entire youth. Szapocznikow would never speak of it directly, not even after representing Poland at the Venice Biennale in 1962. She leaves the audience alone with her unsettling work.
The Kunstmuseum Ravensburg is now showing Szapocznikow’s second survey exhibition in Germany. The show begins with early sculptures in bronze, cement, and marble, which already display her distinctive visual language, fluctuating between fear and coquetry, and progresses to works made of artificial materials. A key early work in Ravensburg is Eksumowany (Exhumed) from 1955–57: a black, mummy-like bronze figure, its limbs amputated except for two stumps, its posture seeming to rise from a grave while emitting a silent scream. The scream reoccurs in 1970 in a purulent yellow wall relief into which the artist collaged photographs of herself as a child and of a dead prisoner in a concentration camp: With the corpse’s mouth rigidly gaping open, its emaciated face contorts into the grimace of death. Pamiątka I (Souvenir I), 1971, demonstrates how Szapocznikow transformed her trauma: through a body of work that boldly combines intimacy and vulnerability with a grim sense of gallows humor.
Translated from German by Michael Rade.
