Recognized as one of the most important Polish sculptors of the post-war era,[1]: 49 [2]: 39  Szapocznikow utilized diverse and experimental mediums to investigate and examine the human form, recalling genres such as surrealism, nouveau realism, and pop art.

In 1962, she was offered a solo show at the Venice Biennale and moved to Paris in 1963, where she became friends with Pierre Restany and experimented with innovative materials and techniques in sculpture.

After the fall of communism in Poland, her work gained recognition domestically and abroad, including a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2013.

According to documentation from their stay, the change in internment in autumn of 1943 was due to Szapocznikow's mother scolding of a German doctor who "did not acquit himself well of his duties.

However, there are letter fragments of correspondences with her first husband, Ryszard Stanisławski [pl] that mention her war experience: "But the difference is that in the process of your formation in the last 10 years you have not gone through that baptism of despair, all these things, everything didn't end for you irretrievably several times as it did for me in the ghettos and the camps.

[9][10] In 1947 she studied at the Academy of Art and Industry in Prague under the tutelage of Josef Wagner,[9] after which she attended Paul Niclausse's atelier at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

[12] The artist took part in numerous competitions to create public monuments to Chopin, Polish-Soviet friendship, Warsaw heroes, the victims of Auschwitz, and Juliusz Słowacki.

Such technical innovation allowed Szapocznikow to immortalize a personal language informed by her exposure to death in childhood, traumatic memories of the Holocaust, as well as witnessing the premature collapse of her own body due to tuberculosis.

[13] Her choice of using photographs of herself and of friends in forms of synthetic resin calls upon the processes of sculpture and photography as grave diggers and carriers of melancholy.

"[11] The artists herself comments on the inevitability of the end with the conceptual project: "If one day during a figure skating competition some Peggy Fleming of the time executes her program in the frozen crater and if we, the spectators, amazed by her wonderful and frivolous pirouettes, are surprised by a sudden eruption of lava and become petrified for ever, like the inhabitants of Pompeii, then the triumph of the moment and of the force of transition will be complete.

"[11]Alina Szapocznikow died March 2 in Praz-Coutant due to the last phase of her illness, bone cancer and advancing paralysis.

[12] Throughout her career, Szapocznikow explored the fragmented human body through sculptures of bronze and later used modern plastic materials including polyester, polyurethane, and wiring.

The work evokes heroic Herculean figures and victims of the 79 CE Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii, further driving the idea that valorized bodies are not immune to the impact of war.

Made in 1956, Difficult Age is constructed of patinated plaster—a rather delicate medium for sculpture—that can easily be read as a metaphor for the fragility and impermanence of youth and beauty.

[15] After being diagnosed with breast cancer, Alina Szapocznikow began her Tumors Personified series experimenting with polyester resin and polyurethane—a new use of materials which most artists had not utilized at this time.

Her male contemporaries (e.g., César Baldaccini, Arman) had exhausted this notion of the mechanized body, but Szapocznikow's functional household objects maintain a strange sensuality.

Bird was part of a series of abstract works that Szapocznikow created in 1958–1960 that were characterized by their inverted center of gravity and their organic and distinctive expressive forms resembling shapes in nature.

[citation needed] Bird is made from cement and metal, exceptionally heavy materials for its dimensions—the sculpture stands 166 cm tall.