Monika Sosnowska

“My works have to look as if somebody else did them,” Monika Sosnowska has remarked. Her monumental Stairway, 2010, is a case in point—a spiraling staircase that makes three turns before it reaches a dead end against the ceiling of the gallery. With heavily bent steel and crooked steps, the construction is both odd and beautiful, twisting and turning in such a way that it seems it was devastated by some natural catastrophe.

Sosnowska is based in Warsaw, a city full of architectural contrasts that range from the rebuilt medieval town that was destroyed during World War II to huge Communist-style residential buildings to shiny post-1989 corporate facades. Much of her practice reflects on the changes in the cityscape and the ideology involved. The artist notices that traces of the Communist era are disappearing rapidly, even though there are fine examples of modernist architecture among them such as the Supersam, the first self-service store in Poland, which was awarded an architectural prize in 1963 and then demolished in 2006. She takes fragments from such buildings and bends them into sculptures, commemorating their beauty and their loss.

Stairway was inspired by an emergency exit built in 1971 at the Museum of History of Tel Aviv, which Sosnowska came upon during a residency in Israel in 2008 just prior to the staircase’s deconstruction. The resulting piece stands out due to its precise placement in the spacious and light-flooded gallery, itself a fine example of a German Democratic Republic modernist building on Berlin’s historic Karl-Marx-Allee. Because of the dialogue that is created between the transparent and well-preserved gallery architecture and the ruinous, violently treated sculpture, Stairway seems a site-specific perfect fit. It works like a monumental sculpture with melancholic overtones.