Monika Grabuschnigg — Photo © Neven Allgeier

Monika Grabuschnigg

Monika Grabuschnigg (1987, Austria) lives and works in Berlin. In her work she focuses on human topics such as desire, grief and melancholy. There, she finds traces in everyday objects, such as domestic appliances, clothing and plants. By turning these into installations she exposes fundamental topics of our existence.

In 2018, Grabuschnigg was crowned with the Berlin Art Prize. In 2020 and 2022, she received a grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn. Her work features in international private collections and various public institutions, including the State Museum Vorarlberg; the Artothek des Bundes in Vienna; and the Graphic Collection in the Fine Arts Academy, Vienna.

On display at COME CLOSER

Middelheimmuseum

Monika Grabuschnigg, Symptomatic Relief (Antwerp), 2024, Courtesy the Artist - foto © Ju Aichinger

Symptomatic Relief (Antwerp), 2024

Sculpture, new work

Grabuschnigg’s work interrogates the notion of time, and human desires, needs, and sorrows that its passing awakens. Using the fridge as a metaphor, she investigates methods of preservation and self-collection. Recognizable household objects thus become symbolic mediators between loss, care, self-keeping and decay. In previous works, the artist was concerned with a kind of endemic, domestic, personal melancholia; this new work shifts attention to the collective and ritualistic. While released from an obvious religious heft, reduced to fragments and decorated with mundane items, the pews in the installation tap into a different type of unresolved longing – one that may find a more apt satisfaction within the realms of sociality, history and our communal past.

Continuous viewing
Please do not touch