Monica Bonvicini (born 1965 in Venice[1]) is a German-Italian artist who works with installation, sculpture, video, photography and drawing mediums to explore the relationships between architecture and space, power, gender and sexuality.
She is considered part of a generation of artists that expanded on the critical practices of the 1960s and 1970s to conceive of space and architecture as a material that could engage with discourses of power and politics, defining art as an active form of ‘critique’.
[2] She was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and the Preis der Nationalgalerie (The National Gallery Prize for Young Artists) from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in 2005.
[5] With the architectural installation I Believe in the Skin of Things as in That of Women, 1999, she won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999[6] along with Bruna Esposito, Luisa Lambri, Paola Pivi, and Grazia Toderi.
[9] Bonvicini has also been invited to contribute as a guest lecturer in major institutions such as Columbia University, New York/US, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin/Italy, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel/Switzerland, Museum Ludwig, Cologne/Germany, Whitechapel Gallery, London/UK, Kunsthochschule Mainz, Mainz/Germany, among others.
[12] Monica Bonvicini works with a variety of media, her research encompasses psychoanalysis, labour, feminism, design and urbanity, and the influence of private and institutional spaces on behavioural codes.
[15][16] Her work critically examines the legacy of modernism addressing both its artistic and social dimensions, while also drawing upon references from minimalism, conceptual art, Institutional Critique, feminist and queer subcultures as well as civil rights and other political movements.
[6] The installation constitutes an architectural space, constructed out of damaged drywall panels and aluminium studs, bearing quotes from famous male architects, including Auguste Perret and Adolf Loos.
The sketches evoke the drawings found in Charles Eames’s seminal essay, “What is a House?” (1944) intended to illustrate the potential leisure activities within a residence, emblematic of a new, more adaptable modern domestic dwelling.
[3] An exhibition of the four works by shortlisted artists Monica Bonvicini, John Bock, Angela Bulloch and Anri Sala was presented at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin from 1 September - 16 October 2005.
[28] Bonvicini reuses the imagery of the ice masses seen in Friedrich’s painting to establish connections with themes of ruin within the framework of Romantic ideals; central to this linkage are concepts intrinsic to Romanticism, including the reverence for nature and the pursuit of scientific inquiry.
While reconstructing a famous Romantic painting, the work represents in a visual striking way the shape of an iceberg, as if one would have, by circumstances due to the global warming, ended up in the fjord in front of the opera house.
The artwork is a replication of a Marcolini Villa, a prevalent architectural archetype found in the northern regions of Italy as well as Switzerland and France, designed in the late 1960’s to serve as the “ideal family home”.
[44] Referencing both media imagery and her own photographs taken during her time in New Orleans,[44] the series draws attention to the political consequences and social dislocations caused by global warming in the era of the Anthropocene.
[45] Themes such as love, aggression, feminism, and rage are depicted through fragments from notable authors like Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Natalie Diaz, Soraya Chemaly, and Andrea Dworkin, that have been reshaped by Bonvicini into new syntactic and semantic forms.