Monica Bonvicini

Critical text

For Monica Bonvicini (b. 1965, Venice), ‘Disegno’ means not just drawing, but also sketching, design, pattern, scheme, plan, or aim. Bonvicini’s ‘drawings’ take in architectural plans, studies in perspective and figuration, stencilled texts, song lyrics, collage and photo-based works in tempera. Her drawings, sometimes also sketches, drafts, and concepts for her sculptural or media works, show a wide range of powerful forms of expression balanced between intimate psychological content and its social and political reflection. ‘Hurricanes and Other Catastrophes’, a large-scale series of drawings about natural disasters, started after she was invited to contribute to the New Orleans Biennale in 2008 as the city was still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. The same year the financial crisis hit: ‘If you had a house’, the artist stated, ‘it was gone, or at least the value of it. [It made me realise] that everything—climate change, politics, the economic situation—is all the same thing’. She works mainly from found photographs of catastrophes from the U.S. because ‘they best represent this turbo-capitalist society that we are living in’. Her drawings are often accompanied by quotations which in a lyrical and poetic way contrast the aggressive way in which the drawings are executed.

Text by Bettina Steinbrügge