Hardcover, 352 pages, 31 × 34.5 cm, German/English
Over roughly twenty-five years, Monica Bonvicini (b. Venice, 1965; lives and works in Berlin and Vienna) has created a vast collection of drawings, including sketches, designs, and concepts for the sculptures, installations, and works of media art that have earned her worldwide renown, as well as many standalone works that constitute a significant part of her oeuvre in their own right. These drawings evince a wide range of forms of forceful and aggressive expression as well as intimate psychological themes such as vulnerability, nakedness, isolation, and repressed violence. As in all of Bonvicini’s work, there is also a critical engagement of space and architecture. Her graphical work intensifies the interconnections between sexuality, power, and psychological experience by integrating the body and the human being into the representation, an aspect that is absent from her large installations in space.
The book presents a large selection from more than a thousand sheets, ranging from small pieces of paper measuring around four by six inches to large formats. The artist uses pencils, inks, and opaque white, and often employs stencils, as well as photographs and found printed matter she inserts into her drawings, another instance of Bonvicini’s characteristically expressive poetics.
