Alina Szapocznikow: Autobiography in fragments.

Alison Gingeras | Ursula | 31st August 2026

As a teenager Szapocznikow survived a Nazi concentration camp. Her later sculptures never revisited that trauma directly. She was acclaimed for figurative abstractions, casts of legs, arms and breasts presented as if they were found objects. They spoke to the body’s “devastating confrontation” with life while also affirming its “continued capacity to feel and to love”. Her final work, made following a cancer diagnosis, was Szapocznikow‘s statement that “the body remains the ultimate measure of human experience”.