Monika Sosnowska Fir Tree

In her works, Monika Sosnowska transforms, modifies, and distorts basic architectural elements. She deforms metal constructions, guardrails, staircases, beams, and angle profiles, giving them unusual shapes. Deprives them of their original function and rescales them, creating expressive sculptures. The works resemble twisted fragments of demolished buildings or larger forms of intact constructions abandoned at rubble heaps.
These architectonic installations are meant to affect our senses, distort our sense of gravity, weight, and hardness of matter, instil anxiety with their rescaled forms, unnatural deformation and surprising placement in gallery space. Changing our perception of reality, they influence our frame of mind. The experience of Sosnowska’s sculptures occurs primarily in the sensual-mental sphere. Sosnowska often alludes to the aesthetics of place, the context in which these works are exhibited. Elements of modernist architecture constitute an essential point of reference in her art.  Local Warsaw modernism and city’s changing architectural landscape form an important part of this archive of visual inspirations. Sosnowska documents building demolitions, housing schemes and DIY constructions found at marketplaces and housing estates. Sosnowska’s works quote from the buildings – often demolished or nonexistent – that she documents. Thus, her works are not just expressive illusory constructions but also forms that retain a fragmentary memory of the architecture of postwar modernism.