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‘I produce awkward objects,’ the sculptor Alina Szapocznikow wrote in 1972 ‘Of all the manifestations of the ephemeral, the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of all joy, all suffering and all truth’ Awkward, precarious, vulnerable bodies are as crucial to an understanding of Szapocznikow’s oeuvre as they are to her biography As a result, her life and work are often viewed as inseparable, a conflation that poses an interesting predicament regarding the extent to which one should read an artist’s work through the lens of their personal experience   Born into a Jewish intellectual family in Kalisz, Poland in 1926, Szapocznikow was ghettoised by the Nazis during her teenage years, and sent to concentration camps including Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz After the war, she trained as a sculptor in both Prague and Paris, and returned to Poland in 1951, where she produced a number of large-scale public commissions and exhibitions, including The Climbing (1959), a monument to those who died in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising In 1963, she moved back to Paris, where she remained until her death from breast cancer in 1973, aged 46   Despite having been an influential and well-known artist in Poland since the 1950s, until relatively recently Szapocznikow has remained internationally obscure The trajectory of her marginalisation and rehabilitation is familiar: the double bind of being both Polish and a woman meant she was overlooked by the Western and male-centric gatekeepers of art history, only to be celebrated post mortem Like many women artists who have died young or suffered unfortunate circumstances, such as Ana Mendieta or Francesca Woodman, there is a tendency to view Szapocznikow’s work through her life story, so that her sculptures and drawings become illustrations of this history Her experiences of war and proximity to death undoubtedly influenced her work – and are hard, if not impossible, to untangle from it But to focus solely on biography runs the risk of disregarding her involvement with avant-garde developments: the expansion of sculpture as a non-figurative form, the unconventional use of construction materials (cement, latex, polyester resin, and polyurethane foam), and an