Monika Sosnowska

Monika Sosnowska makes work where the notion of space is made explicit by intensifying the experience. Her carefully constructed installations, with their references to modern architecture, offer such surprises as strange scale proportions and other trompe l'oeil principles. The architectural installation that Sosnowska has designed for De Appel is made up of geometrical forms. Making use of changes in scale, she plays with the idea that the spectator is not only inside the sculpture but also outside it. This reversal of interior and exterior, in combination with the labyrinthian system of corridors, causes the spectator to feel estranged from the existing situation. In this way Sosnowska confronts us with the influence, which should not be underrated, that architecture has on sensory perceptions and the physical relationship we have with our environment. In 2000 she made the installation Bon Voyage, a system of complicated spatial units, walls and panels. Sosnowska gave the walls a neutral white colour onto which she applied monochrome bands of colour running horizontally or vertically. The labyrinthian effect thus created gave a complex appearance to the formal structure.In Corridor (2002) at the Venice Biennial, Sosnowska commented on the dreariness that characterises certain buildings. A closed door leads to a clinical-looking corridor - with PVC floor, strip lighting and a green skirting-board, typical of buildings in the former Eastern bloc - that seems to disappear slowly into infinity. The optical illusion was created by a fifteen metre long construction whereby the ceiling became lower and lower and the space at the end more and more narrow. The illusion had the intensity of a film image where one lands in an unreal dream world. A world like that in the film Being John Malkovich (1994), where an office with a very low ceiling, sandwiched between two floors, provided direct access to the protagonist's head. Sosnowska is often inspired by simple geometric patterns. Her installation Untitled (2003) is based on the form of the staircase. In the first section of the installation a staircase made of thin planks was suspended in the space, black and white abstract patterns were applied to the walls, and a black carpet led to a second room filled with a series of staircase elements in all manner of types and sizes. By covering everything with the same material as on the ground Sosnowska thus created an unreal world in which the space seemed to dissolve into endless varieties of right-angles.

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Monika Sosnowska