Artist, born in 1972 in Ryki, Poland. Her works are temporary, installations tailored to a particular space and existing for each particular exhibition before being destroyed.

Monika Sosnowska studied at the Schola Posnaniensis (a private art academy in Poznań) between 1992 and 1993, then spent five years at Poznań’s Academy of Fine Arts in the painting department. In 1999 she went on to complete a year of postgraduate studies in Amsterdam, at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten.

In 2003 Sosnowska was awarded the prestigious Baloise Art Prize in Basel, Switzerland, as well as the Polityka's Passport award given by Poland's most influential weekly. Today she lives and works in Warsaw, where she is represented by the Foksal Gallery Foundation.

Sosnowska spent most of her time in Poznań painting. But during her final years at the academy, she says herself 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 3-D painting.

Sosnowska 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 she created a piece called "The Additional Illumination" in Amsterdam, which involved placing 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. Her next artwork that year was "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 peer into the room through a glass door.

Sosnowska’s 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, so that the viewer wandering through them begins to lose his sense of orientation and to wonder whether his surroundings are real or fictional. One of the formal tricks the artist uses is to play with scale, most often in the context of the human body. With "Little Alice", created in 2001 at the Center for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Sosnowska makes precisely this type of joke -- 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. As Sosnowska remarked:

“I am especially interested in the moments when architectural space begins to take on the characteristics of mental space.” (Monika Sosnowska, “Mala Alicja”, www.csw.art.pl).

In the 2001 group exhibition “Painting Competition” in Galeria Bielska BWA, Sosnowska painted a gigantic folk paper cut-out on the exterior wall of the building. It took the form of 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. With “Manifesta 4” in Frankfurt am Main (2002), Sosnowska built a labyrinth-like row of claustrophobic, square rooms, each of which contained two or three doors leading to identical white cells. The viewer could circle endlessly through the labyrinth looking for the exit. For the 2003 exhibition “Hidden in Daylight”, organized 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.

“Invited to relate to the newly opened gallery space at New York City's SculptureCenter in 2003, she proposed a small booth in the gallery yard containing a succession of proportionally diminishing doors, each the perfect miniature of the previous door. The installation, which looked very small from the outside in the context of the large side lot, was actually quite dense. It forced the curious viewer to bend forward or to squat to get inside, only to discover another door just behind the one that was just opened. The enfilade ended with a light-box.”

The architectural structures that Sosnowska creates are based on uncertain premises, confusing the viewer and scrambling his powers of perception. As she once wrote,

“It happens that we are accustomed to recognizing 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 a illusory moment when the object is categorized 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.” (Monika Sosnowska, “Mała Alicja”, www.csw.art.pl and Aneta Szylak's “Construction Works” in: "Architectures of Gender: Contemporary Women's Art in Poland", exhibition catalogue, SculptureCenter, 2003

. In 2003 Monika Sosnowska took part in the 50th Venice Biennale exhibition with “Clandestini”, curated by Biennale Director Francesco Bonami. In the Arsenale she built a corridor over a dozen meters long, covering the bottom half of the walls with green panels. The corridor appeared to be much longer than it was, but it was simply an optical illusion, a practical joke played with the laws of perspective adapted to three dimensions. In reality, the distance was short, and upon entering the corridor the viewer quickly realized that the space became lower and narrower until, approaching the doors at the end, it was impossible to even remain upright.

That 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. It was purchased by Kunsthalle Hamburg.

In 2006 New York's Museum of Modern Art hosted Sosnowska's first solo show in the United States. Her project, which was prepared especially for the show, made use of the existing space to create a three-dimensional sculpture of geometric forms. Since February 2010, Sosnowska has been represented by the Hauser&Wirth Gallery in New York.

Source: English text based on a profile prepared by Ewa Gorzadek, curator at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, March 2004, with updates by Culture.pl in August 2010.

Monika Sosnowska's solo shows have also been hosted by: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León - MUSAC, León, Spain (2006); Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne (2006, 2005); Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw (2005, 2002); The Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna; OPA, Guadalajara, Mexico (both 2005); The Modern Institute, Glasgow; De Appel Gallery, Amsterdam; The Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (all in 2004); Laura Pecci Gallery, Milan (2003); CCA "Zamek Ujazdowski", Warsaw (2001); Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2000, 1999)

She has participated in several group shows, including: "ARS 06 - Sense of the Real", Kiasma Museum, Helsinki; "Satellite of Love", Witte de With, Rotterdam (2006); "We Disagree", Andrew Kreps and Wrong Gallery, New York; "Glasgow International", Sculpture Studios, Glasgow (2005); "Distances?", Le Plateau, Paris; "Parallel Action", Cieszyn, organized by Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw (2004); "Art Focus 4", Israel Festival, Jerusalem; "Contemporary Art for all Children", Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Istanbul Biennale;

, Kurimanzutto, Mexico City; Prague Biennale 1; "Clandestine", 50th Venice Biennale; "Architectures of Gender", SculptureCenter, New York; "S-AIR Show 2", Intercross Creative Centre, Sapporo; Art Basel, Basel; "Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered - Spatial Emotion in Contemporary Art and Architecture", Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, and CCA "Łaźnia", Gdańsk (2003); "In capital letters", Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Manifesta 4, Frankfurt am Main; "Project 1", 4th Gwangju Bienalle, Gwangju, Korea; "Fair", Royal College of Art, London (2002); Raster Gallery, Warsaw (2001); "Escape", Centre de Solai, Bamako, Mali (2000).

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