Exhibitions

This exhibition features the remarkable series of chewing gum sculptures Szapocznikow (1926-73) made in 1971.

The Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow (1926-73) coined the term photosculpture in 1971 to describe her remarkable series of black and white photographs featuring chewing gum forms.  These unique images consist of close-ups of blobs of chewing gum attached to concrete or wooden supports, which have been manipulated into curious shapes in the artist’s mouth. Alongside the photosculptures, a text by the artist describes the eureka moment when she realised that “an extraordinary collection of abstract sculptures was passing through my teeth”. Twenty of these photographs will be displayed in the Mezzanine Gallery at Leeds Art Gallery alongside Hermann Obrist in the Institute’s Main Galleries.

Szapocznikow’s work is often interpreted through her biography, which was characterised by painful episodes of illness and incarceration.  As a young Polish girl of Jewish heritage, her early life was spent in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps.  After the war she studied sculpture in Prague and then Paris.  In 1951 she returned to Poland, and in 1958 she was one of seven shortlisted artists in an international competition chaired by Henry Moore to create a memorial to Auschwitz. She eventually went back to Paris in 1963, where she had contact with the Nouveau Réalisme movement.  Szapocznikow increasingly used casts of herself as subject matter, fragmenting and reassembling disembodied limbs, torsos and breasts.  Her untimely death at the age of 47 was caused by breast cancer; a subject she also explored through her work.