Monika Stricker is a German artist based in Brussels. A former student of Rita McBride at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, she was in residency at WIELS in 2013. Stricker is interested in the social and post-symbolic meanings of sculpture. Her work values signals over symbols. These signalizing features are manifested in the choice of materials.
For Something Stronger Than Me* the artist presents a new group of objects. Unplugged 1–3 (2017) resembles large-scale body parts made out of wire and filled with plaster and hay. Hay is a natural material that is surprisingly malleable once combined with the wet plaster. When it dries, however, the eventual outcome of the sculpture can no longer be changed. It obtains an apparent fragility and organic-like character. This implicit entropy and dynamic energy is at the heart of these ambiguous objects. By omitting the dominant presence of the phallus and shifting the focus to the gonads or testicles, the initial reference to male genitalia is inexplicit. The objects are reminiscent of a genderless back and buttocks. Exhaled (2017), a crude floor sculpture made of plaster, imagines the same body part but deflated.
Monika Stricker
in the framework of Something Stronger Than Me*
21.11.2017 - 07.01.2018