German artist Monika Grzymala describes her art as being more like drawing than installation works, drawn with sticky tape which wraps and transforms the surrounding space. “Whenever I leave a work, I feel as if I leave a part of me, a part of my body behind,” she says, referring to the performative aspects of her work, where creating each piece requires a physical effort on her part. Her energy as the artist lends itself to the fluidity and dynamic appearance of the tape, which seems to explode from the walls with force.
Gryzmala uses tapes of all kinds to create her pieces: packing, masking, adhesive, upholstery, etc., which are stretched, cut, and criss-crossed in relation to the space they are occupying. One of her works, titled “Drawing Room” (2012), involved a 3.1 mile long continuous piece of tape that was stretched intuitively, across floors, columns and walls, in a way that overwhelmed the space and immersed the viewer inside of her “drawing”. Other works have suspended things such as household furniture in the tape as if it were a sticky spider’s web, or have used saturated colors of tape to evoke the feeling of transience as the colors “mix”. Another piece, titled “Reflection” (2014), utilized silver mirrored tape that reflected the changing light in the gallery. Every piece she creates is entirely site specific and conceptualized depending on the space around it.
Monika Grzymala’ most recent work to date, titled “Fusion”, is currently showing at Eduardo Secci Contemporary in Italy. It is an ephemeral site specific installation made of clear PP tape and black paper tape that measures a little over 2 miles long. Her work highlights her unique drawing style, which she calls “three-dimensional spatial drawing”. “Every space is different, so my one-of-a-kind work is also a learning process for me, and in relation to the process itself, as a “one shot thing”, it’s also a translation of the time I have spent in the space. The number of kilometers of a line better describe my experience than days or hours,” she says. “I indeed see the line, the tape, that I am weaving to a large-scale piece is an extension of my thoughts- making the piece, and I am extending that thought into the line of the tape. So, the product, at the end, it might be interpreted as a kind of self portrait or a self-transformation.”
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