Alina Szapocznikow / Nairy Baghramian

The centenary of Alina Szapocznikow’s birth, marked in the gallery that has been showing her since 1957: over thirty works from 1959-1972, set against sculptures Nairy Baghramian made for these specific rooms. 16 October 2026 to 31 January 2027, curated by Pavel Pyś, free every Thursday.

Zachęta on the exhibition:

Alina Szapocznikow / Nairy Baghramian forges a dialog, for the very first time, between two distinctive renowned sculptors whose practices are rooted in an exploration of the body. Surveying the tension between the corporal, mechanical, and biomorphic, the works of these two artists raise questions of touch, pleasure, pain, trauma, and the abject. Organized on occasion of the centenary of Szapocznikow’s birth, the exhibition brings together a representative selection of Szapocznikow’s work across sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and photography, shown alongside recent sculptures, from Baghramian’s Scruff of the Neck (2016) series.

Szapocznikow and Baghramian are bound by a shared investment in the human form, and its fragmentation, disassembly, and abstraction. Szapocznikow’s sculptures, which often include casts of her own body as well as of friends and family, maintain the recognizability of the human figure. Baghramian, on the other hand, harnesses abstraction to create bulbous and lumpy anthropomorphic sculptures that might suggest an extremity, such as a leg or thigh. While Szapocznikow isolates elements of the body, Baghramian frequently turns to corrective devices such as braces and prostheses, drawing attention to how the body is supported, corrected, and held in place. Both artists share a fascination with squishy materials such as polyurethane, polyester resin, and rubber, that render the body plastic, pliable and liquid. Highly tactile and textured, these artists’ works remind us of the profound fragility and vulnerability of the human body.

The exhibition presents a range of Szapocznikow’s work, made between 1959 and 1972, with an emphasis on her approach to isolating, fragmenting, and proliferating the human form. Small scale sculptures from 1959 to the mid-1960s capture her increased shift from figuration to abstraction through experimentations with textured and distorted shapes suggestive of biological forms, plant matter, and fossils. Her break-through sculpture Leg (1962-1967) marks the first time Szapocznikow created an imprint of her body, a process she would embrace and repeat throughout her oeuvre. The exhibition traces Szapocznikow’s experiments with bronze, cement, car parts and foregrounds a grouping of her pioneering sculptures made with polyurethane and polyester resin. Here, torsos, bellies, and legs in colored resin are embedded into tar-like, oozing polyurethane foam, rendering the body as disintegrating and viscous. Following her 1968 breast cancer diagnosis, Szapocznikow creates the Tumour series, in which she traps underwear, newspaper clippings, and private photographs in resin blobs, creating monuments to her own decay and passing. Finally, the selection concludes with her last series - the Herbier works, in which flattened resin casts of her own face and her son’s body offer powerful considerations of mortality and remembrance.

Made in response both to Zachęta’s galleries, as well as the selection of Szapocznikow’s works on view, Baghramian’s Scruff of the Neck series consists of wall-mounted sculptures that contrast highly polished cast aluminum armatures with tooth-like forms made of porcelain plaster, wax, and rubber. The series’ title references the delicate part of the posterior, namely folds of flesh or fur grabbed for the purpose of control, discipline, or movement. The sculptures propose the idea of encountering the gallery from its reverse side - as though one were entering the back of the head and the oral cavity of a body, or of an institution representing the social body. In this sense, Baghramian conceives the representative halls, Sala Matejkowska and Sala Narutowicza at Zachęta, as a pair of jaws or a speech apparatus - a supporting structure that holds together both her own works and those of Szapocznikow, particularly in relation to Alina Szapocznikow’s work Photographic Sculpture. There, the masticatory apparatus serves to manipulate pieces of chewing gum into abstract sculptural formations which, once transferred into the medium of photography, solidify and attain sculptural status. In dialogue with this work, the sculptures from Nairy Baghramian’s Scruff of the Neck series, with their porcelain-plaster-coated devices mounted on curved forms, inevitably evoke associations with dental prostheses and allude to braces, implants, and dental bridges. As sculptural formations themselves, these works point to the potential of sculptural construction and to the multilayered questions posed by abstract sculpture. Also on view is Baghramian’s monumental suspended sculpture Headgear (2016), which combines gleaming aluminum and soft rubber, silicone, fabric and foam.

Reminiscent of headgear devices employed to forcibly realign the jaw, the work conjures a large missing head, as if it were seeking to correct the very space it occupies. Hung high in the galleries and overlooking visitors, Baghramian’s sculptures can be thought of as metaphors for control, encouraging us to consider how institutional spaces discipline our behavior and shape our experience of the world.

Seen together, the exhibition presents Szapocznikow and Baghramian’s shared engagement with the body, as well as issues of trauma, illness, the abject and grotesque, while also celebrating their shared affinity for humor and irony. Awkward, unconventional, and distinctly individual, works by Szapocznikow and Baghramian defy convention and, in dialogue, expand and celebrate the possibilities of sculpture.

Alina Szapocznikow was born in Kalisz in 1926 and passed away in 1973 in France. She studied sculpture at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She returned to Poland in 1951 and moved permanently to France in 1963. In 1962, as part of the official national selection, she presented her sculptural works, representing Poland, to the international audience at the 31st Venice Biennale. Zachęta - National Gallery of Art has a long engagement with Szapocznikow’s work, having presented her first large-scale monographic exhibition in 1957, a significant survey exhibition in 1967, as well as a major retrospective in 1998. Szapocznikow is one of Poland’s most celebrated contemporary sculptors and her works are included in the collections of multiple museums across Poland, and internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Nairy Baghramian’s work traverses the realms of sculpture, installation, photography and drawing with fearless experimentation, historical acuity and conceptual rigor. Particularly in her prime medium of sculpture, the artist employs an extensive repertoire of techniques, materials and forms to address the spatial, architectural, social, political and contextual conditions of contemporary art. Using an abstract vocabulary that often combines geometric shapes and organic matter, industrial process and gestural procedure, Baghramian’s abstract yet eminently allusive works subtly explore the ligatures between art and other fields of object production (most notably interior design, dance and theater) in order to evoke and address bodies of all variants in both their vulnerability and obstinacy.

German artist Baghramian was born in Isfahan in 1971 and had to flee post-revolutionary Iran as a teenager and has been living and working in Berlin since 1984. Baghramian has exhibited extensively internationally and her works are held in collections including Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, MUDAM Luxembourg, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, among others.

What to expect

The museum gives one figure: over thirty works by Alina Szapocznikow, made between 1959 and 1972. How many Baghramian pieces go on the walls it does not say. This is not a retrospective of either artist, nor two surveys sharing a roof. It is a selection built around a single confrontation: the body taken apart in Szapocznikow, the body propped up by a prosthesis in Baghramian.

The works the museum names:

• Leg - Zachęta calls it her break-through sculpture, in bronze and granite, and dates it 1962-1967; the first time she took a cast of her own body, a method she then used for the rest of her life.
• The Tumour series - made after her breast cancer diagnosis in 1968: underwear, newspaper clippings and private photographs trapped inside blobs of resin.
• The Herbier works - her final series, flattened resin casts of her own face and of her son’s body.
• Scruff of the Neck (2016) by Nairy Baghramian - wall-mounted sculptures that set polished cast aluminium armatures against tooth-like shapes in porcelain plaster, wax and rubber.
• Headgear (2016) - a monumental sculpture suspended high above the visitors, in aluminium, rubber, silicone, fabric and foam.

Baghramian’s pieces were made for these particular rooms. The museum writes that she treats Zachęta’s two grand halls, Sala Matejkowska and Sala Narutowicza, as a pair of jaws or a speech apparatus - the structure that holds her own work and Szapocznikow’s together.

As of 18 September 2026 the museum has published no press materials for this show, no video of its own and no programme of accompanying events. We will add them here when it does.

Context

The museum’s biography of Szapocznikow stops at her studies, her moves and her exhibitions, leaving out what her sculpture is loudest about. She was born on 16 May 1926 in Kalisz and grew up in Pabianice, in an assimilated Jewish family of doctors. During the war she was imprisoned with her mother in the ghettos of Pabianice and Łódź, then in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt. Breast cancer was diagnosed in 1968; she died on 2 March 1973 in a sanatorium at Praz-Coutant in France.

The Tumour and Herbier works belong to those last five years. Her international rediscovery came with the touring retrospective “Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972”, shown in 2012 at MoMA in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Nairy Baghramian is far better known abroad than in Poland, which is precisely the point of this show. Born in Isfahan in 1971, she left Iran as a teenager and has worked in Berlin since 1984.

She has won the Arnold Bode Prize (2014), the Zurich Art Prize (2016) and the Nasher Prize (2022). She took part in documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017). In 2023 she filled the four niches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade in New York with a commission titled “Scratching the Back”.

The curator is Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, whose name Zachęta spells Paweł Pyś on its Polish page.

Tickets and time

• Tickets: adult 30 PLN, reduced 20 PLN, family 40 PLN, students up to 26 years old 5 PLN, young people aged 7-18 2 PLN, children under 7 free, groups 15 PLN per person from ten people up.
• A separate ticket for this show? No. Zachęta runs one price list for the whole building and quotes no separate price for this exhibition. The list does include a “during one exhibition” ticket at 20 PLN, and double-entry tickets at 35 PLN (adult) and 25 PLN (reduced).
• Free day: Thursday. The museum repeats this in the information block on the exhibition’s own page, so the free Thursday covers this show too.
• Hours: Tuesday to Sunday 12:00-20:00 (noon - 8 PM), ticket office until 19:30 (7.30 PM). Closed on Mondays.
• Public holidays during the run: the gallery is closed on 1 November (All Saints’ Day) and open 12:00-20:00 on 11 November (Independence Day). The museum’s holiday list says nothing at all about 24-26 December or 1 January, so check its website before a visit between Christmas and New Year.
• Booking: tickets are sold through the museum’s own online system, but Zachęta announces no timed entry. Queues here are a matter of Thursdays and weekends, not of slots.
• City card: Warsaw Pass holders enter free, as do Deutsche Bank Art Card holders.
• How long: 60-90 minutes for this exhibition. Zachęta opens a second show the same day, Karolina Grzywnowicz’s “Odwrażliwianie” (until 10 January 2027; the museum publishes no English title), covered by the same ticket - allow two hours for both.
• English on site: the museum writes and publishes its own full English text for this exhibition, and its ticket and visitor pages are in English. The museum does not say whether wall labels will be bilingual, whether there will be tours in English, or whether an audio guide is offered.
• Accessibility: the museum describes the building as adapted to the needs of people with mobility impairments, the service desks have hearing loops, and Zachęta’s education programme includes events with Polish Sign Language interpretation and live audio description.

Who it is for: if Szapocznikow is one reproduction of Leg in a textbook to you, this is the visit that explains why her name came back into international circulation. If you follow contemporary sculpture, the other half matters more - Baghramian has never had a broad showing in Poland and is unlikely to get another one soon. Skip it if you want something light or something for children: the core of this show is the body diseased, taken apart and held up by a brace.

What the press says

The exhibition opens on 16 October 2026, so there are no reviews yet. Two previews appeared in January 2026, both naming it among the year’s most important shows in Poland:

• PAP, via dzieje.pl (14.01.2026, Zuzanna Piwek): the Polish press agency puts the show in its annual round-up and stresses that this is the first broad presentation of Baghramian in Poland, the artist whose sculptures stood on the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023 - the dispatch, in Polish
• Zwierciadło (21.01.2026, Aleksandra Urbaniak): the magazine lists it among the fourteen most interesting exhibitions in Poland in 2026 and describes it as a meeting of two sculptors joined by their experiments on the body and divided by how they look at it - the list, in Polish

See also

• Odwrażliwianie - the second show Zachęta opens on 16 October 2026, in the same building and on the same ticket: Karolina Grzywnowicz on what state power does to the senses, until 10 January 2027.
• Sculpture After Stability - the Museum of Modern Art opens a show about contemporary sculpture losing its formal stability on exactly the same day; Warsaw’s two biggest sculpture propositions of the season both start on 16 October 2026.
• VALIE EXPORT. Die Doppelgängerin - monumental bronze scissors by the Austrian artist who has worked on the female body since the 1960s; on view until 16 March 2027, so there is time after Zachęta.
• João Maria Gusmão. Following the White Tiger - the Zachęta show that overlaps the first two weeks of this one: looped 16 mm films, until 31 October 2026, on the same ticket.
• Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw - Zachęta has no permanent display, and the Warsaw institution that shows Szapocznikow year-round is MSN, in rotating arrangements of its own collection.

Museum profile: Zachęta.