Alina Szapocznikow at the Hammer Museum: Sexy Sculptures of a Forgotten Polish Genius

Comments (0) By Andrew Berardini Thursday, Feb 23 2012

Given the fragility of the work and the limited oeuvre of an artist whose life was cut short, this is likely to be the only presentation of Szapocznikow's work to come to Los Angeles for a long time, if ever again.

Even after all that effort to rediscover artists like her, the grand results of those rediscoveries can themselves be ephemeral, like this traveling retrospective, happening only over a few months at a spare few museums.

Szapocznikow's sculptures combining body parts with everyday objects can be creep-show unsettling, like Lampe & bouche (Illuminated Lips) (1966).

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Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Blvd.
Westwood, CA 90024

Category: Museums

Region: West L.A.

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Historically, the contradictory tensions in Szapocznikow's work made it hard to drop her neatly into one major category or another. The common objects she intended to mass-produce from casts of women's body parts had the generosity and democratic attitude of pop but also the dark, subterranean sexuality of surrealism.

There is something tragic and dark and fucked up in her work — but also full, sensual and affirmatively human. Pendulous between sexuality and sorrow, Szapocznikow's aggressive erotics also show a tenderness.

ALINA SZAPOCZNIKOW: SCULPTURE UNDONE, 1955-1972 | Hammer Museum | 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Wstwd. | Through April 29 | hammer.ucla.edu