Out of Body

Out of Body marks Mona Kowalska’s second exhibition with Kerry Schuss Gallery. Using the body as a foundational threshold, corporeal allusions transform boundaries and delineations into metaphoric passageways. After working in textiles for many years, these latest works expand upon this personal history. Kowalska’s surrealist assemblage and curiously-altered domestic objects meld with new techniques and playful shifts in scale and textures, spanning various mediums. Thick hemp rope, crafted from a pre-loom needle-weaving technique taught to Kowalska by artisans in Peru, form weighty and intricate floor sculptures, akin to clothing and through this, also akin to the body. Seeming to stand in for a form that is absent, they gain an anthropomorphic presence, brought to life through intricate diagonals, each originating in a different direction. Oil pastels and pencils pull across the surface as vacillating shapes emerge as suggested forms. Just as the paper’s texture dictates the edges, the landscape-adjacent subjects are a conduit for organizing colors, as chroma, texture, and gesture poetically intertwine. Kowalska explores unstable forms and the expansiveness in humorous constraints and double binds. In one sculpture comprised of hands with feathers, her right hand rendered the sculpture’s left hand, while her left hand created the right. The same materials activating one appendage immobilize the other. For Kowalska, everything is sculpture; she does not need to make it so. Instead, she channels her desire into making the material to speak. Born in Warsaw in 1964, Mona Kowalska emigrated to Baltimore in 1973. After earning a degree in Political Science from the University of Chicago, she studied fashion in Florence and later launched A Détacher—an independent fashion label known for its sculptural silhouettes and conceptual rigor. In recent years, Kowalska turned to art-making, with her first solo show, Mignolo, opening at Kerry Schuss in 2022.

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