Monika Sosnowska

Monika Sosnowska was born in 1972 in Ryki, Poland, and lives and works in Warsaw. Her practice is primarily concerned with sculpture and site-specific installation, using architectural structures, industrial materials, and spatial interventions to transform the environments in which her works are encountered. Her installations often occupy or alter an entire room, creating situations in which architecture, sculpture, and the viewer’s physical experience become closely interconnected. Sosnowska studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań from 1993 to 1998 and continued her postgraduate studies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 1999 to 2000. During her time at the Rijksakademie, she gradually moved away from painting and began to concentrate on the spatial arrangements surrounding her works. This process eventually led her to abandon painting itself in favour of creating environments and structures that could be experienced directly by the viewer. Her installations frequently transform familiar architectural elements into unstable, distorted, or apparently dysfunctional structures. Walls, corridors, ceilings, staircases, doors, and other architectural components are reconfigured, compressed, bent, or displaced, creating spaces that can resemble fragments of buildings while losing their original function. The resulting environments often appear simultaneously familiar and impossible, encouraging viewers to reconsider their physical surroundings and their own position within them. A significant reference point in Sosnowska’s practice is the history of modernist architecture, particularly its relationship to the urban development of Warsaw. MoMA has described her work in relation to a city undergoing rapid transformation, where new construction exists alongside the material remains of the twentieth century. Sosnowska has herself referred to Warsaw as a city “growing up very fast on the ruins of modernism,” and this relationship between contemporary construction, historical memory, and architectural change informs the spatial character of her work. Her approach often involves taking existing architectural or industrial forms and subjecting them to processes of distortion and material transformation. In *Untitled* (2012), for example, she recreated a tiered shoe stand once used at Warsaw’s Jarmark Europa and then physically distorted its structure. Removed from its original commercial function, the object becomes a sculptural form whose altered appearance draws attention to the relationship between utility, material, and abstraction. Sosnowska has exhibited internationally since the 1990s. Her major presentations include solo exhibitions at the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, De Appel in Amsterdam, the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León (MUSAC). She has also participated in Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt, the Gwangju Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented *Projects 83: Monika Sosnowska*, her first solo exhibition in the United States. Her work is held in international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Across sculpture and installation, Sosnowska continues to investigate how architecture can be transformed from a functional structure into a perceptual and imaginative experience. By distorting familiar forms and disrupting the expectations attached to architectural space, she creates environments in which the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, memory, and physical experience become deliberately unstable.