Abstract

This thesis performs an ethical reading of Alina Szapocznikow’s (1926-1973) sculptural work that avoids both reductive biographical determinism and overly retrospective, ahistorical projections. To do so, I consolidate biographical, artistic, and intellectual influences, and present Szapocznikow’s later work—in particular her cast self-portraiture and polyester resin sculptures from 1960 onward—through a dual lens, as both political and personal. Specifically, I analyze Szapocznikow’s aesthetic of fragmentation and dissolution as a form of abject imagery that, while deeply entrenched in contemporaneous themes, can be read as both a proto-feminist problematization of bodily representations and a potential confrontation with internalized trauma. Through a nuanced integration of psychoanalytic theory, trauma studies, feminist art history, and finally art therapy, I challenge the dominant feminist framing of abject imagery as primarily oppositional and destabilize the strict boundary between fine and therapeutic art practices by arguing that Szapocznikow’s abject sculptures can simultaneously critique and care. Rather than pathologizing her practice or reducing her aesthetic to biographical terms, however, I approach Szapocznikow’s art as an unconscious refraction of unassimilable trauma: neither a direct reflection of her experiences nor wholly severed from them. As such, these monstrous forms may function—like the artistic products of therapeutic practices—as a means through which she could, if only unintentionally, approach, hold, or reorganize her traumatic experiences.