Alina Szapocznikow

Alina Szapocznikow was born in 1926 to a Jewish family of doctors in Kalisz, Poland. She survived the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, being imprisoned in several ghettos and concentration camps. After the war, she studied sculpture in Prague and Paris, where she developed her artistic style and experimented with various materials and techniques. She mainly worked in bronze and stone, creating expressive and simplified figurative sculptures. She also used synthetic resins, polyester, and polyurethane to produce casts of her and her son's body, often in multiple and colorful forms. Her work was influenced by surrealism, nouveau realism, and pop art, and reflected her personal experiences of trauma, illness, and death. She died in 1973 from breast cancer, after undergoing several surgeries and treatments. She left behind a remarkable and provocative body of work that challenged the conventions of sculpture and the representation of the human body.