Background
Monika Sosnowska was born on May 7, 1972, in Ryki, Poland.
Monika Sosnowska, photo courtesy of www.baloise.com.
Aleje Marcinkowskiego 29, 60-967 Poznań, Poland
During the period from 1993 till 1998, Monika attended the Painting Department of the University of Fine Arts in Poznań.
Sarphatistraat 470, 1018 GW Amsterdam, Netherlands
Between 1999 and 2000, Sosnowska studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.
Aleje Marcinkowskiego 29, 60-967 Poznań, Poland
During the period from 1993 till 1998, Monika attended the Painting Department of the University of Fine Arts in Poznań.
Sarphatistraat 470, 1018 GW Amsterdam, Netherlands
Between 1999 and 2000, Sosnowska studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.
Monika Sosnowska was born on May 7, 1972, in Ryki, Poland.
Between 1992 and 1993, Monika studied at the Schola Posnaniensis (a private art academy in Poznań). It was during her final years at the academy, that she realized, that the "painting started to escape her canvas". She began to create works, that played with both two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional space, finally giving up the canvas altogether and instead using the space itself as a sort of 3D painting.
During the period from 1993 till 1998, Monika attended the Painting Department of the University of Fine Arts in Poznań. In 1999, Sosnowska went on to complete a year of postgraduate studies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.
Monika treats space as a medium for her works, which are only displayed for a limited time before being destroyed. She always designs her projects to fit into a specific space. In 2000, Sosnowska made the work, titled "The Additional Illumination", in Amsterdam, for which she placed hundreds of lamps on the highest rooftop of the Royal Academy of Art. The lamps lit up the sky from dawn to dusk during the summer solstice, lending a helping hand to the sun. The same year, in 2000, she created the work, called "Partly Non-Existent Space", in which Sosnowska obscured part of a room in total darkness, depriving it of its materiality. The illusion was enhanced by the fact, that the viewer could only gaze into the room through a glass door.
In 2001, Monika produced the work "Little Alice". The artist, inspired by the adventures of Alice in Wonderland, decided to build four rooms, each corresponding to Alice's changing height as she shrinks. She designed them as an enfilade and painted them in Victorian style, with each room getting smaller and smaller until the last one was just big enough for a mouse.
The same year, in 2001, for the group exhibition Painting Competition in Bielska BWA Gallery, Sosnowska painted a gigantic folk paper cut-out on the exterior wall of the building. It took the form of an old peasant women in long, broad skirts with hens, growing out of their hands, and the fact, that the painting was done in psychedelic pink, contributed to its playful character.
In 2002, with Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt am Main, Monika created a labyrinth-like row of claustrophobic, square rooms, each of which contained two or three doors, leading to identical white cells. The participant could circle endlessly through the labyrinth, searching for the exit.
For the 2003 exhibition Hidden in Daylight, organised by the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Cieszyn, Sosnowska chose Łowicz folk stripes as the theme of her work. Using the stripes' traditionally bold colours, she created a curtain of thin, plastic strips, that divided the gallery space in half. After passing through the curtain, the viewer would see a colourful, spiral composition on the ceiling, reminiscent of a spinning Łowicz skirt.
Also, in 2003, the artist participated in the 50th Venice Biennale exhibition. The same year in Basel, Sosnowska represented the Foksal Gallery Foundation, gaining overnight recognition after winning one of the two awards, given annually to the most promising young artists at the prestigious art fair. The award-winning piece comprised a narrow corridor six meters long, completely white and divided by six pairs of white doors - a construction, that created a Kafkaesque atmosphere, in which architecture starts to control human emotions and becomes in itself a medium of oppression.
Throughout her career, Monika has also created smaller-scale works. One of them is her 2006 untitled project for Helsinki's Kiasma Museum. The work took the form of a damp patch on a corridor ceiling and of a spot, which the dripping water has made on the carpeting. The same year, in 2006, Sosnowska completed her work "A Dirty Fountain".
Also, in 2006, Monika showed her work, entitled "The Tired Room", at the exhibition "At the Very Centre of Attention" at the Zamek Ujazdowski Contemporary Art Centre. She showed a much deformed interior, which could well be a projection of sick imagination or a dream phantom, producing a vision of a mental space, expressing a rare emotional state. "The Tired Room" is evocative of the experiments with Cubist forms, which were used in the 1919 German Expressionist film "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari", whose plot unfolds inside the brain of one mentally ill.
The same year, in 2006, Sosnowska had a solo show at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, for which she used the existing space to create a three-dimensional sculpture of geometric forms. In 2007, the artist participated in the 52nd Vienna Biennale, where she represented her native Poland. In 2008, Sosnowska became a member of the selected group of artists, who exhibit their work in Switzerland's Schaulager. At a joint exhibition with Andrea Zittel, she showed three objects, including the monumental "1:1" from Venice.
In 2010, Sosnowska became the first artist, invited by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf to fill the K21 courtyard with a semi-permanent exhibition, lasting two years. The following year, in 2011, she had solo exhibitions at the Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum in Mexico and the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 2012, she created an outdoor installation "Fir Tree" for the Public Art Fund in New York City.
Currently, Monika lives and works in Warsaw, where she is represented by the Foksal Gallery Foundation.
Monika Sosnowska gained prominence for her enormous skeletal architectural forms. In 2003, she achieved international recognition with her work "The Corridor", an intervention, that formed part of the Arsenale exhibition of the 50th Venice Biennale. Also, the installation, called "1:1", is one of her monumental works.
In 2003, Sosnowska received the Bâloise Prize at Art Basel and the Paszport Polityki Award, given by Poland’s most prestigious weekly. In 2012, she was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize.
Installation view "Living Cities"
Installation view "Monika Sosnowska: Habitat"
Installation view "Monika Sosnowska: Architectonisation"
Installation view "Monika Sosnowska. Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity"
Installation view "Monika Sosnowska. Stairway"
Installation view "Monika Sosnowska 1:1"
Installation view "The Tired Room (Der müde Raum)"
The Corridor
Monika uses space as a medium for her work. Her work also involves modifying pre-existing or purpose-built architectural forms, transforming the physical space into mental space and playing with the viewers' perceptions. Her works are always intriguing and incorporate an element of surprise - the viewer, wandering through them, loses his sense of orientation and wonders whether his surroundings are real or fictional. Also, one of the formal tricks the artist uses is to play with scale, most often in the context of the human body.
Although Sosnowska's works are often referred to as architectural installations, she is rather a space sculptor, who perceives space as a consequence of form, depriving architectural elements of their tectonic and formal functions - of the causal relationship between function and form - before she uses them. Her architectural structures have no defined function, their impact being mostly metaphorical and affecting senses and emotions.
To design her spaces, Sosnowska follows the principles, which resemble those observed, when writing mathematical exercises or making up rebuses: she uses elements of architecture to produce desired combinations. Walls, doors, floors, stairs and door handles reappear in her works in a variety of ways, which are often inspired by the esthetics of the venue, in which they are shown. She takes a formal approach, but at the same time likes playing with contexts and meanings.
Modernism, understood as a utopia of the rationally planned space, is one of Sosnowska's fundamental points of reference, manifesting itself through a recognizable artistic code, which is widely used in the international style in architecture. Sosnowska, however, reaches out for its home-spun version, applied in the construction projects of Poland under communism and makes no secret of her references to the aesthetic standards of the times, in which she grew up. Even if she builds her architectural installations from simple geometrical forms, it is easy to identify the familiar elements: the oil-painted corridors are reminiscent of waiting rooms and public office interiors and the claustrophobic rooms remind the viewers of the cramped conditions of standard flats in prefab high-rises.
Quotations:
"It happens, that we are accustomed to recognising reality and to classifying it according to comprehensible systems. Even looking at art becomes a part of this scheme. We feel safer, when an object corresponds to the norms and is called art. It is much more difficult to take a position on something, that may be intriguing, but exists outside conventional categories. There comes an illusory moment, when the object is categorised and appears to be understood. We have no idea, that what we are denying ourselves is the pleasure of sensing things just the way they are, without the need to name them."
"I am fascinated by the process of aging of certain objects from that period, the moment in which, due to the context change, they transform into something totally different and separate from their original function. This observation has triggered some of my works, for example 'A Ruin', which is a sculpture of an ordinary oil-painted wall in a state of partial decay."
