Gate by Monika Sosnowska

Gate by Monika Sosnowska
Date: January 20 (Tuesday) – March 31 (Tuesday), 2015

Le Forum is holding an exhibition by a Warsaw-based artist Monika Sosnowska, born in Poland in 1972. Greatly influenced by avant-garde art culminating in Warsaw in the 1960s and witnessing the fall of communism in Poland, Monika Sosnowska draws her inspiration from the past history of modernism and the changes of our times.

Sosnowska’s grand-scale sculptures and installations feature motifs from real architecture. She has seen old buildings and public facilities symbolizing socialist authority torn down in daily life. The architecture, defunctionalized of past utopian significance, following a path of deterioration and negligence and transforming into new architecture, has inspired much of her work. Sosnowska takes the walls, staircases, façades, windows, corridors and other architectural aspects in fragments and interprets the forms into her language of unique sculptures.

Her first solo exhibition in Japan will showcase her latest work inspired by the gate of a private residence. Originally meant to separate the house from the street, the gate stands here in a neutral setting belonging neither to an individual nor a city. The gate was created by an industrial process primarily using steel, which was then bent and twisted into a distorted form. The defunctionalized artwork, retired from its original role, still faces us with an imposing presence. As we now live with insecurity and unrest in a world where things around us are falling apart, it is as if Sosnowska has put a magical spell on us, showing us our underlying resilience. Even when our dreams and hopes fade with the fall of a regime, we are able to survive and be reborn. The message is all the more powerful since Sosnowska has experienced utopia and negligence in her life.

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