Alina Szapocznikow

Broadway 1602, New York

While it can be a lazy writer’s crutch to defer too readily to biography, the course of Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow’s extraordinary and painful life is integral to understanding her awkward, restlessly experimental and often darkly hilarious art. A potted history of her life would include the early deaths of her father and brother, her imprisonment during World War II in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt, her studies in art schools in Prague and Paris after the war and finally her tragic death from breast cancer at the age of 47 in 1973. Read the rest of this entry »