Architectonisation

Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art devoted a major exhibition to Monika Sosnowska, conceived in dialogue with the architecture of the museum designed by Álvaro Siza.

Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art hosts a major survey of the sculptural works of Monika Sosnowska.

Presented over seven of its largest galleries, the Museum atrium and the exterior Pátio da Adelina in a progression of installations and objects made between 2003 until the present, “Architectonisation” reveals in breathtaking form, the elaboration of an artist who thinks sculpture.

Monika Sosnowska, <i>Market</i>, 2012-2014 — Monika Sosnowska, *Market*, 2012-2014

Among the works included are early corridor and pavilion structures that create alternative spatial routes that rely on the viewer’s movement through them, freestanding sculptures and sculptural interventions that allude to collapse and the fragment, and large-scale wrought iron works composed of structural elements for buildings on a scale of one to one, that are melded into suspended, draped and shifting forms in space to monumental effect. Smaller-scaled spatial propositions, both abstract and functional, reveal Sosnowska’s attention to the details of materials and forms as both investigative and deeply human.

A fully illustrated, bilingual catalogue in Portuguese and English accompanies the exhibition. It includes new essays by Gabriela Świtek, Professor at the Art History Institute, Warsaw University, focusing on the reference to Eastern European modernism in Sosnowska’s work, and by the exhibition’s curator, Suzanne Cotter situating Sosnowska’s sculpture within a history of contemporary practices in the 20th and 21st centuries. The publication features installation views of the exhibition at Serralves and a photo essay by the artist relating to her materials research for the exhibition in Porto.