Biography
Monika Schwarzová was born in former Czechoslovakia. She earned her MA in Spanish and Portuguese Philology at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.
In 2004, Monika moved to London, where she completed a Diploma in Interior Design at the Inchbald School of Design. It was during her time there that she discovered a passion for drawing and painting.
Since then, Monika has taken numerous courses to deepen her artistic practice. Most recently, she completed a Post-Diploma in Figurative Painting at Heatherley’s School of Art. In September 2025, she will begin an MA in Fine Art at the City & Guilds of London Art School.
Monika has exhibited
Biannual exhibitions at Wimbledon Art Studios since 2015 till 2023.
Summer 2023 part of The Summer Exhibition at Trinity Art Gallery, London
2025 part of the winter exhibition at Prince and Pilgrim Gallery
For painting sales and commissions please email Monika directly: monika@monikas.co.uk
Monika’s practice is grounded in an inquiry into the body as a condition of being—its presence, fragility, and capacity to inhabit space under pressure. Initially working through landscape, she came to understand terrain and body as inseparable, and her practice has since evolved into a sustained negotiation between the two. The body functions as both figure and ground: at times emerging, at others dissolving into atmosphere, carrying weight, tension, and resistance within space.
Working primarily through painting, and at times performance, often using her own body as a point of reference, Monika explores states of instability and endurance, vulnerability and restraint. Earlier works examined disintegration and transcendence, tracing the body’s susceptibility to emotional and psychological extremes. Her previous series, After Watteau, reinterpreted the painter’s fêtes galantes as uncertain psychological landscapes, where figures appeared provisional—absorbed into shifting fields of light, shadow, and vegetal matter. Rather than harmony, these works articulated a continual negotiation between body and environment.
Her recent work marks a decisive shift away from narrative, exposure, and expressive display. Engaging with questions of containment, density, and withholding, the body is no longer presented as an image to be consumed, but as a presence tested by pressure. Figures are often obscured, fragmented, or partially absorbed into their surroundings, resisting legibility and resolution. Darkness functions not as mood or symbolism, but as structure—an organising force through which endurance and sovereignty are articulated without performance.
Across her practice, Monika is less concerned with representation than with the conditions under which presence persists. Her work asks how a body can remain without explanation—how it can occupy space without yielding to recognition, interpretation, or closure. What emerges is a visual language rooted in restraint and gravity, where meaning is withheld rather than declared, and where power resides not in assertion, but in the capacity to endure.