Kerry Schuss Gallery

Press Release

Kerry Schuss Gallery is pleased to present Mignolo, New York artist Mona Kowalska's first solo exhibition. Kowalska's sculptures evoke a dreamworld of beautifully wrought disjunction, a world populated by common, domestic objects strangely altered and metaphorically charged.

A small hatchet with a soft volume of felt incasing its handle reads as a wedding of male and female. Several other modestly scaled pieces involve surrealistic relations between the hard and the soft in the form of genteel porcelain tea ware from whose interiors bulge erotically suggestive forms made of felt, a material that Kowalska works with exquisite subtlety. 

The exhibition’s piece de resistance veers from the intimate toward the monumental consists of two stuffed legs of giant teddy bears – one big and one half as big like a mother and her child. Occupying the center of the gallery with comic-minimalist aplomb, these enigmatic objects slyly tease the viewer’s Freudian anxieties. 

Born in Warsaw, Mona Kowalska emigrated to Baltimore with her mother at the age of 9. After receiving her BA  in Political Science from the University of Chicago, she returned to Europe, spending the next decade in Florence and Paris honing her skills as a fashion designer. In 1998, and now in New York City, she began designing under her own label - A Détacher. 

In 2019, she turned to art making. She lives and works in New York City.