Alina Szapocznikow
Hauser & Wirth London | Savile Row
I didn’t know it at the time, but the day I went to see “To Exalt the Ephemeral: Alina Szapocznikow, 1962–1972” would be, in light of the Covid-19 lockdown, my last day on the streets of London for a long time. Soon, we would be told to hide our bodies away, sick and healthy alike, until . . . I didn’t know when. At the gallery, I encountered striking evidence of the human body in all manner of states: ailing, productive, joyful, anarchic, in pieces, enduring. The word indexicality well describes the turn Szapocznikow’s works took in the decade leading up to her death in 1973. Their forms not