Monika Michalko: Notes from Lagunilla
MARC STRAUS is pleased to present Notes from Lagunilla, the New York debut of Monika Michalko, opening at 299 Grand Street with a reception for the artist on Friday, March 19, from 5–8pm. The exhibition will remain on view through April 26.
Over the past fifteen years, Michalko has developed a highly codified pictorial language distinguished by chromatic intensity and destabilized geometric form. Her compositions, situated between landscape and still life, construct immersive, self-contained environments in which vegetal forms sway, tendrils unfurl, and gradient skies dissolve into misty prismatic atmospheres. These paintings propose worlds that are at once fully articulated and subtly estranged: perspectival logic is skewed, scale shifts unpredictably, and the decorative verges on the hallucinatory.
This latest body of work emerged from recent travels in Mexico — where she visited Oaxaca, Mazunte, Puerto Escondido, and Mexico City — and registers a marked expansion of the artist’s palette and iconographic vocabulary. While Michalko has long employed saturated color, here chroma assumes a heightened cultural and spatial specificity, inflected by the density of urban life and the material vibrancy of local markets. The exhibition takes its title from La Lagunilla, a historic market whose commercial networks date back to the Aztec Empire. For Michalko, whose practice bears affinities with Surrealist strategies of juxtaposition and psychic intensity, the market becomes both subject and metaphor: a site where commodities, histories, and social relations circulate in layered simultaneity.
Several works directly engage the sensorial excess of this environment. In Danza de las Piñatas, piñatas proliferate in centrifugal suspension; in Teotitlan richly patterned textiles accumulate in vertiginous stacks, their surfaces oscillating between abstraction and representation. Michalko’s engagement with Mexican modernism is underscored by a statement from Leonora Carrington, who observed in a 1992 documentary, “Mexican markets are a world that goes back to the beginning of humanity. That’s where things happen.” Michalko’s paintings channel this conception of the market as primordial theater, an arena of exchange that is at once economic, symbolic, and mythic. Position the pieces in works, including A Town in the Land of the Legends, recall the distilled urban backdrops that appear in the paintings of Nicole Eisenman. Both artists share an affinity for constructing all-encompassing pictorial worlds, though Michalko’s approach resists the same autobiographical weight or forensic scrutiny of her immediate surroundings.
The exhibition’s most explicit cultural citation appears in Michalko’s rendering of La Catrina, a figure deeply embedded in Mexico’s visual consciousness. First popularized in 1913 by the lithographer José Guadalupe Posada as a skeletal caricature of elite European fashion, the image was later monumentalized in Diego Rivera’s 1946–47 mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central, in which the elegantly adorned skeleton, now entwined with a feathered serpent evoking Quetzalcōātl, became an emblem of mestizo identity and post-revolutionary cultural synthesis. Michalko studied Rivera’s mural while in Mexico City and reinterpreted this icon through her hyper-saturated, rhythmically patterned idiom, finding in the grinning, glamorous skeleton a resonant analogue to her own interest in hybridity, theatricality, and the porous boundary between celebration and mortality.
Born in Sokolov, Czech Republic, in 1982, Michalko lives and works in Berlin. Her recent institutional presentations include a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Nürnberg, which traveled to Städtisches Museum Engen, as well as inclusion in “Jetzt! Junge Malerei in Deutschland (Now! Young Painting in Germany),” a major survey presented at venues including Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Kunstmuseum Bonn. Her work has also been exhibited at the Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst, among other institutions.
