Biography
Monika Schwarzová is a Czech-born artist. She holds an MA in Spanish and Portuguese Philology from Charles University in Prague. After moving to London in 2004, she completed a Diploma in Interior Design at the Inchbald School of Design, where she discovered her commitment to drawing and painting. She later completed a Post-Diploma in Figurative Painting at Heatherley School of Fine Art and is currently completing an MA in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School.
Monika has exhibited regularly since 2015, including the Wimbledon Art Studios Open Studios, Trinity Art Gallery, and Prince & Pilgrim Gallery in London.
Monika's practice explores the body not as an image, but as a condition of being—vulnerable, resilient, permeable, and continually shaped through its encounter with the world.
Working across painting, textile, and performative processes, she treats the canvas not simply as a support but as a body in itself. Rather than depicting experience, her works undergo it. Raw linen is folded, buried, soaked, exposed to rain and sunlight, marked by charcoal, pigment, fire and smoke. Burning, stitching and tearing are not gestures of destruction but acts through which the material acquires memory, fragility and presence.
Her practice has evolved from painting psychological landscapes toward creating material events in which the distinction between body, surface and environment begins to dissolve. Chance is welcomed as an active collaborator: weather, gravity, time and the behaviour of materials participate in shaping the work. Through these processes the canvas becomes a site of transformation rather than representation.
Monika is interested in how presence can emerge through restraint rather than spectacle. Openings, scars, folds and traces remain visible as records of endurance rather than symbols of violence. The work resists fixed interpretation, inviting viewers to encounter uncertainty, vulnerability and quiet strength without narrative resolution.
At the core of her practice lies an ongoing enquiry into what remains after control is relinquished, and how material itself can carry memory, vulnerability and the possibility of renewal.
For painting sales please email Monika directly: monika@monikas.co.uk