Artist:
Monika Sosnowska (born 1972 in Ryki, Poland; lives and works in Warsaw).

Materials:
Steel, paint.

Description:
“With Tower […] Sosnowska takes on the International Style. Measuring approximately 110 feet in length, this sprawling work is inspired specifically by the design principles of German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the 20th century’s Ur- Modernist, and makes reference to the iconic International Style trope he elevated to sheer physical poetry: the glass curtain wall. With Tower, Sosnowska quotes the steel framework underlying the hung glass façade of Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago masterpiece, the Lake Shore Drive Apartments, abstracting, disfiguring and bending that framework into a fallen monument. Unmoored from its rational geometry, Tower stretches and curves across the gallery’s vast exhibition space. Through Sosnowska’s re-imagining, a coolly elegant, machined, and perfectly readable structure is transformed into something wholly opposite. […] Tower is the latest product of Sosnowska’s current exploration of the curtain wall as architectural motif and metaphor.”
—”Monika Sosnowska: Tower,” Hauser & Wirth website, 2014.

“If one views Tower simply as a mutilation of the buildings’ curtain wall elements to critique the International Style, one misses its more seductive qualities. This gesture would express nothing more than the usual criticism waged against the style over the past 50 years: that its patriarchal promise of utopia was a chimera, and that as architectural styles go, the International Style is one in the long lineage of styles. But despite his essentialist mandates, Mies van der Rohe struggled with resolving dialectical ideas of freedom and order, and, nature and form in his works. Sosnowska illuminates this struggle by generating a spatial investigation that allows viewers to draw their own balance by illuminating architectural principles through sculpture.”
—Jordan Hruska, “Monika Sosnowska: Tower,” Domus, September 12, 2014.