Monika Bulanda

Artworks

Biography

Monika Bulanda is a visual artist and musician, born in Krakow in 1983.

Since her early days she has shown a deep interest in art, music, theatre, sports, languages and culture. Monika started playing the piano when she was only six years old, later moving on to drum classes with the teacher Wiesław Piszczyński, who encouraged her to become a professional musician.

Later, she took painting classes at the local gallery of Stary Sacz and, at only thirteen, she won her first prize at a regional art competition.

Monika Bulanda got then a bilingual degree in Spanish and Polish. When she was sixteen, she started performing illegally (due to her young age) in music clubs in Krakow, becoming one of the first female drummers in Poland. Still pursuing her interest in languages, she enrolled the University of Warsaw into the Eastern Department to study Chinese and its culture. Bulanda graduated at the same time in Music and Sinology, following the courses in two different Universities. For many years she kept on painting in her spare time and collaborated in many projects of other artists.

After obtaining the two degrees, the artist decided to leave her music band to travel to Beijing (China), where she got accepted into the Film Academy of the city at the Foreign Department of Chinese Language and Culture. She soon started showing up in the music scenes of Beijing, playing with several Chinese musicians and bands into clubs and music festivals all over the country.

After visiting New York in 2010, inspired by the architecture and the multicultural environment, she developed her own idea of mixed technique: a collage to which a 3D acrylic colour outline is applied, producing plastic shapes on a two-dimensional structure. Soon after she signed a contract with one of the biggest contemporary art galleries in Istanbul, where she still lives nowadays. Her works were shown in the Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair and she stirred a wide interest among art collectors.

Shortly after she opened two exhibitions: a solo and a collective one.

Presented by Aria Art Gallery, she took part in the latest edition of ARTAnkara and, in June 2019, she created, at the Florentine location of the gallery, the personal exhibition “No war within, no war without”, curated by Antonio Budetta.

It’s probable that the most romantic reflection of the XX century was the naive belief that the world will become a better place to live in once man acknowledges the ongoing evil. At the same time, ironically, while the perception of a scientific and technological progress is real and affects the world, it has also redefined our rules. Monika Bulanda contemplates these last century’s paradoxes and communicates her thoughts by the means of art. She does it through the techniques and the materials used in her works, but also through the structural connotations of the canvases. From time to time she prefers to explore the abstract space instead of material topics, together with the “unknown journey”.

The colors and the tridimensional shapes change, depending on the observer’s perspective: at the same time, they offer different individuals the chance to receive multiple points of view, which recompose themselves into a whole unique painting – in every look there is only one of the innumerable possibilities of which reality is made of. More than defining the act of looking as a power relationship, Bulanda uses this metaphor to reflect the current political atmosphere. It becomes possible to see the signs of supermodernity on the surface where real and fiction, rational and irrational blend together.

Exhibitions