ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum features the artwork of Monika Sosnowska in an exhibition that includes a new series of works that continue her investigations into the relationship between form and function, ornament and structure, recognition and confusion. The exhibition consists of three major sculptures, all from 2013: The Window, a Bauhaus Design School window façade; The Stairs, a staircase absent a railing; and I Profile, a bent steel I-beam. It is on view February 14 through April 21, 2013.
Monika Sosnowska’s sculptural and architectural works take up specific forms and spaces and manipulate them into disorienting, often only barely recognizable new configurations. In 1:1, her widely acclaimed project for the 2007 Venice Biennale, Sosnowska compressed the steel skeleton of a Communist-era housing block and crammed its twisted, contorted form into the much smaller interior of the Polish Pavilion. Other works have borrowed certain aspects of a particular site, altering and recontextualizing them in ways that both heighten the viewer’s awareness of form and structure, and call into question what is rational or even possible within the languages of sculpture and architecture. Freed from their original functionality, Sosnowska’s architectonic works and environments evoke a moment when, as she puts it, “architectural space begins to take on the characteristics of mental space.”
On the occasion of this exhibition, the AAM will publish a definitive, career-spanning look at the Polish sculptor—a beautifully illustrated book that documents a decade’s worth of Sosnowska’s exhibitions and features new essays by the exhibition’s curator, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, who is the Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director of the Aspen Art Museum; Adam Szymczyk, Director and Curator of Kunsthalle Basel; and Maria Gough, Joseph Pulitzer Jr. Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University.
Monika Sosnowska (b. 1972, Ryki, Poland) lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. She studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam and the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan. In addition to representing Poland at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, she has had solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2004); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz (2007); Schaulager, Basel (2008); Herzliya Museum for Contemporary Art, Israel (2010); and K21 Ständehaus, Düsseldorf (2010–12), among many other venues and institutions. Sosnowska is a finalist for The Hugo Boss Prize 2012.
