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’s practice is grounded in an ontological inquiry into the nature of being: the body, its presence, its fragility, and its articulation within space. Once absorbed in landscapes, she came to understand them as inseparable from the human body, and in recent years her work has shifted into a relentless weaving of these two domains. The body becomes both figure and ground, both subject and terrain—its gestures dissolving into the atmosphere, its essence infusing the landscape with presence.
Working across painting and performance, often using her own body, Monika explores states of disintegration and transcendence, pain and elation, the human condition as layered and unstable. Her recent body of work, After Watteau, draws inspiration from the 18th-century painter while transforming his idyllic fêtes galantes into more uncertain terrains, where human forms emerge and dissolve amid painterly fields of light, shadow, and vegetal growth. Here, she seems to have found a reconciliation: a visual language where the body and nature coexist, not in harmony or conflict, but in perpetual, shifting dialogue.
What compels Monika is not representation, but revelation—the revelation of what it means to inhabit a body that is both vulnerable and ecstatic, temporal and transcendent, always situated within the larger landscape of existence.
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
For painting sales and commissions please email Monika directly: monika@monikas.co.uk