Monika Sosnowska: Wall

Kurimanzutto is pleased to present the second exhibition by Polish artist Monika Sosnowska in the gallery. Returning to Mexico she will present a series of new sculptures that reproduce and transform specific architectural elements found in her native Warsaw.

Sosnowska looks to architecture as the source material for her work, analyzing 1960s and ‘70s socialist buildings from Poland where she grew up under the communist Eastern Bloc, and where she continues to live today. Her sculptures reflect on the Modernist assumptions of functionality and the promise of progress represented in the constructions of that period. Through her practice, Sosnowska confronts the shifting social and political values embodied in our built environments, inspecting the remains of an era and how it continues to echo in today’s daily life.

Dividing the gallery in two halves is a large wall conceived by the artist as a pivotal instrument within the exhibition. This partition wall becomes a sculpture in itself, or rather a large installation composed of several smaller works that depend on it. Using materials such as metal, PVC and concrete, Sosnowska replicates once-functional structures, transforming them almost beyond recognition. Pipes, fences, handrails, gates, flag holders and vendor stands are among the basic vocabulary used by the artist. She translates these forms first by constructing small paper models, and then by building 1:1 full-scale works produced in collaboration with industrial workshops. The resulting pieces are contorted replicas, which combine a certain degree of violence and malleability with the beauty of the alluringly strained and distorted shapes. An example of this effect can be found in her outdoor sculpture Fire escape, on display outside the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, where she presented a solo exhibition in 2011.

Deformed and crumpled, the sculptures that compose the exhibition at times appear fragile, precariously resting over the wall, while others are forcefully crushed under it. Steel pipes crowned with fist-like cracked concrete blocks, shot-through glass and warped flag holders evoke the cityscape from which they were abstracted. Sosnowska’s treatment makes these elements look unfamiliar, fostering a new way of perceiving both the artwork and the reality around us.