Monika MichalkoHere in the Real World

A new ship of fools: trees and climbing plants, birds and mushrooms, dwellings and stage-set-like interiors: in her painting Monika Michalko (*1982 Sokolov, Czech Republic) combines figurative and object-like, organic and ornamental, abstract and architectural elements. Her pictorial compositions are always fictitious: memories, phantasms and dreamlike scenes form a painterly cosmos defined by laws of its own. The specific tonality of her works likewise reinforces their dreamlike quality. Again and again these compositions vaguely recall modernist artists such as Paul Klee, Kazimir Malevich, Giorgio de Chirico, Odilon Redon or James Ensor. In 2023 she created her tableau vivant “Ship of Fools,” in which various performers, along with children and a dog, appear before a backdrop of steeply reared cardboard waves threatening to break. Monika Michalko achieves a tension-filled balancing act between the animate and the inanimate, stasis and movement. The image of a ship full of fools that has strayed from its course has manifold connections with Nürnberg: the late medieval moral satire “Das Narrenschiff” by Sebastian Brant (1457–1521) was one of the most popular illustrated works in the German language of the fifteenth century. The artists with whom Brant collaborated in Basel on the illustrations included the young Albrecht Dürer. Monika Michalko finds a new interpretation of the motif and stages a contemporary metaphor for the state of our chaotic world.

Exhibitions:
Kunsthalle Nürnberg, 29/6 – 6/10/2024
Städtisches Museum Engen + Galerie, 16/11/2024 – 21/1/2025