Monika Rosen is a Toronto-born artist currently based in Kingston, ON. She is an Academy Scholar recipient and graduate of the Masters of Fine Arts Program at the New York Academy of Art. Previously, she completed her BFA with Honours in Painting and Printmaking at Queen’s University, Canada. In between, she lived in Whistler, BC, where she was an active member of its burgeoning artistic community, taking a lead in public arts programming as curator, teacher, performer, and live painter, before moving to New York to complete her Masters.

Monika has attended artist residencies in Manchester (England), Assisi (Italy), and St. Andrews, NB (Canada), and her paintings have been part of exhibitions in the US, Europe and Canada. Her painting The Klaxon is in the collection of 21C Museum Hotels.

Rosen’s work was recently exhibited in Return to Form II at Six Summit Gallery in NYC, in Quinte En Plein Air at the J.M. Parrot Gallery in Belleville, ON, and will be exhibited in July 2022 in her upcoming solo exhibition Fish Out of Water in Cornwall, Ontario.

Out of her studio, she enjoys the balance of working on new series of oil paintings and monotypes, selective commissions, and connecting others to their own unique artistic process through her online mentoring and teaching.

Statement:

Monika Rosen turns to the human figure and the elusive, dynamic properties of water to explore ideas around the psyche, longing, vulnerability, and healing. More specifically, she is interested in negotiating the processes of how we separate from and integrate with others. She embodies this dynamic in her work between (and within) the human figure and the landscape: individual characters may form an interwoven structure, less individuated figures may be tempted to emerge from or assimilate with their painted environs, and a seemingly uninhabited landscape may show the love of discovery and the danger of imbalance. By reflecting these ideas, Rosen is interested in our responsibility to learn who we are both as individuals and as interconnected communities.