31 October – 5 December 2015
525 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 627 6000

There is no such thing as easing yourself into the sculpture of Alina Szapocznikow. From the moment you step into the eponymously titled show of her work, currently up at Andrea Rosen Gallery, you will be deeply provoked, moved, and unsettled. Szapocznikow’s Piotr (1972), a six-foot tall sculpture of the artist’s son, confronts the viewer upon entry. Made when he was 18 and Szapocznikow was suffering from breast cancer, to which she would succumb the following year at age 47, the work is a resin cast of her only child’s nude adolescent body. Formed in a vertiginous pitch, the sculpture cannot stand on its own and must be supported by a Plexiglas brace in order to be displayed. The emptiness of the space behind Piotr suggests a void, like a pieta with the mother figure subtracted, the son left dangling in space.

Even before her cancer diagnosis, Szapocznikow spent good deal of her life enduring profound trauma. Born in 1926, when she was a teenager the Nazis confined her for years to the Jewish ghettos in Poland before she was imprisoned in a series of concentration camps during the Second World War. She managed to persevere through all of it. Several years after the war’s end, Szapocznikow contracted tuberculosis, from which she languished for months, nearly dying. Survival came at a cost to her fertility — she was unable to bear children afterwards (she and her first husband adopted Piotr Stanislawski).

In great part because of what she suffered, Szapocznikow had an uncommon fearlessness about the body (both hers and others’), and strove to leave a physical imprint of it, as well as the memories it contained, embedded in her work. Though she occasionally used the bodies of others, Szapocznikow most often applied the casting process to herself. Her breasts, lips, and legs recur in her sculptures. Disembodied from the whole, they serve as relics from the body of a person who seemed to preternaturally intuit the brevity of her life. This stunning show, exquisitely installed, offers a great breadth of Szapocznikow’s objects and the secrets they reveal when spent in contemplation of them. Each work on view here is wisely given ample space to breathe, and the act of scrupulous looking will yield generous, intimate fruit.

In Stèle (Stele) (1968) a bubble of black, polyurethane foam encases a set of resin-cast lips and knees. The lips are colored black and the knees are bent, protruding from the foam, so that it appears like a crouched human figure mainly hidden from view. Beneath this form, laid perpendicular to the knees, is a set of diminutive legs, cast in the black foam. A full circle around the work reveals another set of the same small legs adhering to the sculpture’s verso, while across the tops of the resin-cast knees a fetal shape, also of foam, is splayed. It’s so subtle that it is easy to miss, but the realization of this amorphous form drives straight to the gut — Stèle (Stele) is a mourning totem.

The informe that is alluded to in Stèle (Stele) is made fully manifest elsewhere, as in Sous la Coupole (Under the Cupola) (1970), a sculpture devastating in its total and contained abjection. Two nebulous blobs of polyurethane foam, in different shades of dismal brown, squat across from each other on the floor like competing piles of shit. A nylon pantyhose stretches between the two, each end of the stocking submerged into each pile. Szapocznikow routinely sunk personal items of clothing or other objects into her sculpture, often so deeply that they are rendered nearly unrecognizable. You can almost smell disintegration emanating from the two heaps while the intestinal stocking is meanwhile an activated life force, valiantly resisting the decay that is pulling it in both directions.

If the sorrow that unfolds seems too much to bear, the back room of the gallery, given over to Szapocznikow’s “sculpture-lamps,” offers some literal and metaphorical relief. She was known for a mordant wit, and the sculpture-lamps, while still being potent vessels of physical memory, are of a lighter tenor. Illuminowana [L’illuminée] [Illuminated Woman] (1966-1967), a plaster body with glowing breasts of sugary pink, and a seashell of blue resin, impressed with Szapocznikow’s lips where the head should be, stands like a warrior at the entrance to the room. Elsewhere, small, table-sized lamps of lips and breasts sit atop pink, phallic columns. One’s eyes are drawn to the corner, from where the large Kaprys-Monstre [Caprice – Monstre] [Caprice – Monster] (1967) radiates. The sculpture, a central element from which spring forth four long, thick, tube-like protuberances, glows a deep blood red, lighter at its core. It appears at once both slimy and inviting, and the viewer is compelled to examine it closely, pondering the folds and crevices of its aortic pipelines. Kaprys-Monstre is suffused with a defiant vitality; it pulsates with life. Her pus and blood have long drained away, but Alina Szapocznikow, flouting death, is still present.

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Xanti Schawinsky: Eclipse at Broadway 1602
September 16 through November 22, 2014
1181 Broadway, 3^rd Floor (at 28th street)
New York, 212 481 0362

Though it hardly seems possible, digging through the art historical annals seems to always unearth the work of artists unfairly overlooked. Such is the case with Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky, one of the original Bauhaus artists. A trailblazer in commercial advertising, pioneering theater set designer, and professor at Black Mountain College, among several other institutions, Schawinsky created a prodigious output of multifarious work in his lifetime. But since his death in 1979, his importance has gone largely unrecognized. Two shows currently on view in New York, “Xanti Schawinsky: Head Drawings and Faces of War” at the Drawing Center and “Xanti Schawinsky: Eclipse” at Broadway 1602 are of critical value in reintroducing the artist’s work to contemporary audiences.

A Polish Jew born in Switzerland, Schawinsky came to the Weimar Bauhaus in 1924 to study, then was soon put in charge of its theater department. When the school was closed under duress due to Nazi threat in 1933, Schawinsky emigrated first to Italy, and then with the assistance of Hans Albers, to the United States, in 1936. He taught at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina for two years before relocating once again, to New York, in 1939. The two bodies of work on view at the Drawing Center date to the heart of Schawinsky’s years in New York during the Second World War, when he was fully involved with the city’s vibrant community of expat artists.

In the pencil-on-paper “Head Drawings” series, Schawinsky repeatedly depicted his own likeness, composed of natural and man-made objects, like a modern-day Archimbaldo. The drawings are sensitive, and very fine, and display a highly skilled hand. It would be easy to spend hours in front of a work like Jewelry Head (1941-1944) from which a face appears in an assortment of jeweled necklaces dangling from a disembodied hand. In The Lumber Room (1946), Schawinsky has drawn his face in profile. Skin sizzles with fissures and fault lines, cracked like dried mud in the sun. One side of the face has been peeled away, revealing an inner sanctum comprised only of wooden scaffolding, which retreats to a vanishing point. Whether the scaffolding is meant to support the head from the inside, or whether it is a meaningless structure, supporting nothing at all, seems to have been left deliberately ambiguous.

In the “Faces of War” series, all of which are mix media, watercolor, and black pen works on paper, Schawinsky composed human faces from military machinery and other paraphernalia used in war. They are by turns terrifying, despondent, and humorous. Unlike the “Head Drawings,” which alluded more obliquely to Schawinsky’s despair over the calamity of World War II, the “Faces of War” series addressed it bluntly. Works like The Parachutist (1942) are chilling. The artist has depicted a military parachute with a face, its eyes and nose comprised of cannons, protruding from the center and pointed squarely at the viewer. The slotted “teeth,” formulated from the strings of the parachute, resemble the mouth of a skeleton in skull-and-crossbones iconography. However, Schawinsky was not without a sense of humor. In The Admiral (1942), a heavily armored sailing vessel has two portholes making up his beady eyes. His frothy beard is formed by the churning waves beneath the boat, and punctuated by a life preserver — the confused ‘O’ of a mouth. The expression appears perplexed rather than formidable.

The anxiety and conflicting emotions Schawinsky expressed towards the war in these 1940s works on paper is instructive when examining a selection of his later paintings from the 1960s and ‘70s at Broadway 1602, for war and its threats seem to provide the link between the two bodies of work. By the time Schawinsky made these paintings, he had returned to Europe, once again settling in Italy, where he would spend the remaining years of his life. In the front room of the gallery, several paintings airbrushed on canvas render swirling, luminous clouds of paint in vivid color. In studying them, the eye sometimes begins to see in them human faces in dreamlike states — kissing, for example, or in repose. But in works like Al-di-là (Eclipse), 1965, the deep reds and oranges of the paint simultaneously suggest an alternative, and apocalyptic, proposition. The clouds come to resemble the aftermath of a bomb — perhaps the bomb — a distinct fear prevalent during the Cold War years. The canvases in the second room offer further optical illusion. The gallery is hung with Schawinsky’s stunning “Eclipses,” geometric shapes rendered on canvas. Each canvas has stretched over it a swath of gauze, separated by a support frame. The gauze has also been painted upon, but the shapes do not precisely align. Thus, as the viewer moves about the room, the forms appear to shift. The “Eclipse” paintings are more subdued than the explosive airbrushed canvases in the front room, and hearken back to the austere Bauhaus aesthetic of Schawinsky’s early career.

A small catalogue available at Broadway 1602 indicates that the work on view at the two galleries is only a small portion of Schawinsky’s varied oeuvre. Perhaps these small exhibitions will provide the spark necessary to reignite interest in this important artist’s work.

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