Monika Sosnowska

Who is Monika Sosnowska?

Monika Sosnowska studied at the Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam 1999–2000. In 2003 she received the Bâloise Prize at Art Basel as well as the Polityka's Passport award given by Poland’s most prestigious weekly.

Sosnowska lives in Warsaw. She studied in the painting department at Poznan, but during her final years at the academy she found 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, always designing projects to fit into a specific space. Often she modifies pre-existent architecture, transforming the physical space into mental space and playing with the viewer’s perceptions. She has explained: ‘I am especially interested in the moments when architectural space begins to take on the characteristics of mental space.’