Description

Alina Szapocznikow was born in Kalisz in 1926. As a teenage girl, during WWII, she underwent deportation to a concentration camp with her mother. She survived deportation but the experience left a huge impact on her later artistic practice. The exposure to seeing dead bodies on the streets changed her relationship with physicality and embodiment. She studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and later at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris. She represented Poland at the 1962 Venice Biennial after which she finally settled down in Paris. She started out as a fairly traditional sculptor, but evolved dramatically over the years, becoming one of the most innovative sculptors of the 20th century. Her deconstruction and reimagining of what sculpture is went hand in hand with experimenting with new materials such as polyester resin, polyurethane foam, textiles, newspaper, and grass. In her final years she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She started to use her own body to cast and create sculptures, revisiting past traumas in the process of foregrounding the impermanence of the human body. "Derrière / Lampe - Fesses" belongs to a series of pieces the artist completed in the last years of her life, between 1970-1971. The bottom painted in hues of nude turns into a lamp, which is a typical manner in which the artist deconstructed body parts. Turned into artworks, body parts do not lose their natural colours, which emphasizes the fluidity of the divide between reality and art.