Fiancee Foller Blanche 1971

Alina Szapocznikow made this sculpture, Fiancée Folle Blanche, using plaster and polyester resin. It’s a figure from behind, classical, almost like a Greek statue, but it merges with a big pink blob. She’s so white, like marble, but standing on something that looks like crumpled fabric, and that pink thing is so… fleshy. It’s hard to look away. I can imagine Szapocznikow wrestling with these materials, trying to capture something about the body, about memory, about transformation. The plaster is so cold and hard, and the resin—that’s a messy, unpredictable material. It’s like she’s pushing and pulling, finding form and destroying it at the same time. I get the sense that she’s not just showing us what something looks like but trying to make us feel it in our guts. All artists are in an ongoing conversation, an exchange of ideas across time, inspiring one another’s creativity, and the way Szapocznikow embraced uncertainty allows for multiple interpretations—it makes this piece so alive.