Artist: Alina Szapocznikow

For Zurich Art Weekend 2026, Hauser & Wirth celebrates the centenary of the Franco-Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow’s birth with an autobiographical exhibition.

Opening alongside Galerie Loevenbruck’s exhibition in Paris, ‘Alina Szapocznikow. Autobiography in Fragments’ is a celebration across two cities, foregrounding the artist’s explosively inventive but brief career, which spanned from the mid 1940s until the early 1970s. Across sculpture and drawing, these two complementary parallel exhibitions will together feature a work from each year that Szapocznikow was active, revealing the full expressive force of a pioneering artist who reshaped the visual language of the postwar avant‑garde, and whose groundbreaking practice transformed sculpture as an intimate register of lived experience.

Born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1926, Alina Szapocznikow survived internment in concentration camps during the Holocaust as a teenager. Immediately after the Second World War, she moved first to Prague and then to Paris, studying sculpture at the École des Beaux Arts. In 1951, suffering from tuberculosis, she was forced to return to Poland, where she expanded her practice. When the Polish government loosened controls over creative expression following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, Szapocznikow moved into figurative abstraction. By the 1960s, she was radically re-conceptualizing sculpture as a record not only of her memory but also of her own body.

Szapocznikow transformed the sculptural medium through radical material experimentation and an unflinching engagement with the body’s fragility and resilience. Her later works—developed between Paris and Poland—demonstrate how she moved beyond traditional sculptural conventions, embracing new materials to capture fleeting traces of life. This two-part presentation coincides with the exhibition at Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, ‘Szapocznikow. Personal’, in Krakow, Poland (20 March – 23 August 2026).