Artist Statement
Curriculum Vitae
Solo Exhibitions 2025 — Selected Works, Moderna Selecta, BerlinGroup Exhibitions 2025 — Call It by Its Name (forthcoming, February 2026) 2025 — BBA Prize 10 Year Anniversary Exhibition, Kühlhaus, Berlin 2025 — Obscura, Berlin 2025 — Layers, Mesken Art Exhibition, Berlin 2025 — Portrait, CICA Museum, Seoul, South Korea 2025 — Kunstpreis der Kulturstiftung der Sparkasse Karlsruhe 2025 — Boomer Gallery, London 2025 — BAAM, Berlin 2024 — Lite Haus Gallery, Berlin 2024 — BAAM, Berlin 2017 — Origins, Brunswick Gallery, Melbourne, AustraliaAwards & Recognition 2025 — Finalist, Kunstpreis der Kulturstiftung der Sparkasse Karlsruhe 2025 — Shortlisted, BBA Prize 2025 — Longlisted, Jackson's Art PrizeI paint the body as a site of pressure.
Not beauty for its own sake — though the painting is careful, realist, slow — but the body under conditions: watched, aged, obscured, escaping, remembered. I am interested in what a human form holds that a face alone can't say, and in staying with a subject long enough that it gives something up.
The recurring subjects in my work are women — not women as symbols, not women in crisis or in service of a narrative about something else, but women just being. Being the main characters. Being in full agency, even in the moments the painting catches them in. I want to paint women who are not waiting for permission to take up space in the frame.
I am AuDHD, and this is not incidental to the work. The hyperfocus, the pattern recognition, the obsessive return to the same formal problems — these are not obstacles to painting but its engine. My practice runs on sustained, specific attention. I don't find a subject and move on. I stay with it until it gives something up.
The work is grounded in feminist theory and politics — in the question of whose interiority has historically been considered worth depicting, and what it means to insist on it anyway. I am also shaped by the Polish Catholic landscape I grew up in, by more than a decade of living in Berlin, and by the material thinking of textiles, which I worked with before I worked with paint. I think about weight, touch, and the labour of making a thing by hand.Bioghraphy
Monika Kalinowska was born in 1987 in Legnica, Poland. She studied international relations at the University of Lower Silesia in Wrocław before moving to Berlin in 2012, where she has lived and worked ever since.Her route to painting was not direct. She worked in textiles first — weaving, fiber art, teaching — before transitioning fully into oil painting. This material history is visible in her work: she thinks about surface, layering, and the logic of how things are made. Her figurative paintings are realist in technique and psychologically precise, interested in bodies, vulnerability, and the weight of what is not shown.Kalinowska's work engages with feminist politics, racial equality, LGBTQIA+ visibility, and the representation of marginalised subjects in moments of genuine interiority rather than symbolic gesture. She draws on feminist literature, personal experience, and the political landscape of both Poland and Germany as ongoing source material. Artists whose work she has learned from include Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Peggy Kuiper, and Mark Tennant.In 2025 she held her first solo exhibition, Selected Works, at Moderna Selecta, Berlin. That same year her work appeared internationally: Portrait at CICA Museum, Seoul; Boomer Gallery, London; and group exhibitions across Berlin including BBA Prize 10 Year Anniversary Exhibition at Kühlhaus and Layers at Mesken Art Exhibition. She was shortlisted for the BBA Prize, longlisted for the Jackson's Art Prize, and named a finalist for the Kunstpreis der Kulturstiftung der Sparkasse Karlsruhe.She is currently developing new work for Call It by Its Name, a group exhibition addressing perpetrator accountability in domestic violence, opening February 2026.