Monika Sosnowska, Residency May July 2014
Monika Sosnowska was born in Ryki (Poland) in 1972. Monika Sosnowska lives and works in Warsaw.
Monika Sosnowska's work mixes architecture and sculpture. Often created for specific sites, her constructions seem to be endowed with an autonomous and unreasonable life. They proliferate and alter the perception of the space that welcomes them, sometimes to the point of completely replacing it.
For this artist, art is first and foremost an experience, a moment when the visitor is confronted with spaces and sensations that not only disorient him or her, but must also prompt him or her to question the spaces in which he or she evolves daily, especially private spaces. To do this, the artist willingly plays with figures such as the labyrinth, the ruptures of scales, the antagonism between emptiness and saturation.
Sosnowska chooses to invest spaces such as ruins, traps or parasitic structures, which she integrates into her own constructions, offering the spectator no position of exteriority.
Monika Sosnowska's work cannot be contemplated, it is not contemplated, it is experienced, it is haunted.
Monika Sosnowska's international fame was confirmed in 2007 with her installation for the Polish Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
During her three-month residency at Atelier Calder, Monika Sosnowska wanted to resume a research project around the theme of models. This project began in 2005, on the occasion of her exhibition "Display" held at the Foskal Gallery Foundation, (Warsaw), which presented both monumental sculptures and their models. It functioned as a kind of small-scale retrospective.
At the Calder Workshop Monika Sosnowska made a series of new models of her upcoming sculptures. Of these, she had two of them made on a large scale, thus joining the "enlargement" concept developed by Alexander Calder when he made models before making monumental sculptures. For Sosnowska, the ratio between the model and the final sculpture can range from 1 to 10. The relationship to scale and space for this artist is therefore of paramount importance.
Monika Sosnowska's sculptures, before being compacted, are real objects resulting from urban planning (gates, gates of public gardens...). The pressure undergone by these objects appears at points of tension where the metal has no choice but to bend. The transformation of these objects disorients the spectator, who by some very realistic clues recognizes the initial object, but at the same time its shape and its new aspect remain illogical, some areas hesitate between mystery and poetry. Monika Sosnowska's formal vocabulary sometimes aims to underline the fragmentary and even chaotic aesthetics of today's world.
In 2013, a solo exhibition was devoted to her at the Perez Art Museum in Miami and in 2012 at the Modern Institute in Glasgow, Scotland. She has participated in several major events on the international art scene: the Shanghai Biennale in 2012, the exhibition Skyscraper art and architecture against gravityau MCA Chicago (2012) The power of Fantasy: Imagination at Work at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and at the MUMOK, Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Museum of Desires, in Vienna, Austria (2011). His work was present in 2009 and 2010 at the exhibition elles@centrepompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou (Paris).