Monika Stricker studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and continued her education during her Wiels residency in Brussels. Monika Stricker’s paintings have a classical spirit, but her work often conveys a sense of the provisional, while her unexpected subjects never leave the viewer indifferent.

After number of years in which the artist has painted faceless men with open legs, displaying their anatomy deprived of a penis, a mutilated identity because it is deprived of what identifies power in the patriarchal society, with this show Monika Stricker approaches new subjects, all of which originate, as the artist explains, from the relationship with her own fantasies and admirations. Indefinite figures that lose any points of reference, primates seen in the act of brestfeeding, dogs, feet, Stricker’s new subjects are a pretext to talk about intimate relationships, existential condition of human being. “I make art in order to give other people my problems,” says Mike Kelley in a well-known statement that could also apply in a way to the work of Monika Stricker. The sense of all this has been perceptively grasped by Marta Papini in her critical essay noting that “portraying nude men, her own feet, dogs or chimps, Stricker’s works confront us with a bare-faced vulnerability. In their presence, we are out of our comfort zone: we are embarrassed voyeurs, witnessing intimate relationships of submission and interdependence.”