MONIKA WEISS
ENNOIA
RECENT WORKS ON PAPER
28 June - 12 September 2025
Monika Weiss, Untitled, 2023, Resin, graphite powder, water, dry pigment on paper, 12 x 20 inches. Photo: Jean Vong
“Drawing for me is a time-based medium. It captures an interval of time. In that sense it is musical. When I begin a drawing, I listen to the paper, to its empty space and its fragile surface. Paper tells me how it wants to be touched, and stained, the way piano tells me which sounds to improvise with. In both drawing and sound, I hope to layer the sonic, fluid matter but also to transcend it. In my early years as an artist I was reading passages in Gnostic cosmology, where I encountered the ancient Greek word Ennoia. In some of the Gnostic myths Ennoia was described as a particle of light that fell into this universe, into the dark world of matter. It became forever trapped within us. “
- Monika Weiss
“Lethe-Medusa (2023-) and other recent ongoing cycles of almost three-dimensional drawings are informed by this idea of light trapped within. Each drawing is born and created without interruption, as an interval of time. Embodied forms call to mind aquatic worlds and volcanic matter. I think of lava and oceans permeating everything, becoming solid, only to melt, evaporate, overflow or explode, again. I am especially drawn towards the deep blue pigment derived from lapis lazuli, a stone mined in ancient Persia (presently Afghanistan). Across cultures and geographies this deep blue color signifies sky, spirituality, and the celestial sphere. For me it relates also to water, the oceans, and to the idea of immersion, fluidity and transformation.”
- Monika Weiss
The artist in her Brooklyn studio.
“For Weiss, drawing embodies and expresses the passage of time, repetition, suggestion, and repercussion; while also celebrating the facture of media (the possibilities that physical materials allow). In this way, the artist’s practice has its basis in traditional methods, where drawing gives credibility to all other media imposed. Unlike other elements of her work — digital images, words, music and sound — drawing, through asserting its authority, implies permanence, but this too can dissipate and become a vestige where the mark becomes a trace. Weiss’ drawing oscillates between proposal and presence, the allusive and the tangible where it competes (not in a precocious way) to establish its unassailable position in the consciousness mediated by the artist.”
- Mark McDonald, Curator, Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Drawing Consciousness: Monika Weiss” in Monika Weiss-Nirbhaya, Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, 2021, pp. 54 – 76.
Monika Weiss, Lethe - Medusa I, 2023, Graphite powder, water, resin, pencil, , and dry pigment on rice paper, 39 x 72 inches. Photo: Jean Vong
MONIKA WEISS, Nirbhaya XIV, 2020, Rubber latex, charcoal, graphite powder, dry pigment on paper, 32 x 22 inches
MONIKA WEISS, Nirbhaya XIV, 2020, Rubber latex, charcoal, graphite powder, dry pigment on paper, 32 x 22 in.
“Monika Weiss’ drawings are a duration of cumulative actions as well as remainders of their material and gestural effects. They have vestiges of the time spent in their making in common with music, and in Weiss’s new Dafne synthesizer compositions, based on recordings of her piano improvisations, the layering and shifts of pitch and tempo to be heard there are equivalent to the artist’s working and reworking the surfaces of her drawings. Describing her musical composing methods, Weiss notes the time passing between recording and editing sessions as necessary pauses to make “a new sonic entity.” This interval is an exquisite parallel to the time she spends waiting for the colloidal applications in her drawings to, as she describes it, “metamorphosize into their finished state.”
– Buzz Spector, “Monika Weiss: Body of Drawing” in Monika Weiss-Nirbhaya, Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, 2021, pp. 108 – 113. To read full text click here.
MONIKA WEISS, Nirbhaya III, 2017, Rubber latex, charcoal, graphite powder, dry pigment on paper, 30 x 23 in.
“Some explanation is needed to account for what could be regarded as the deliberately conservative tactic of isolating drawing, one element of Monika Weiss’ trans-disciplinary practice in which performance, sound, video, photography, drawing, and objects, together create experimental spaces, sentient states and generate non-linear narratives. Drawing cannot be separated from its codependent allies, but Weiss has repeatedly made the point that drawing is at the heart of her practice, thereby recognizing its distinctiveness.”
- Mark McDonald
MONIKA WEISS, Nirbhaya III, 2017, Rubber latex, charcoal, graphite powder, dry pigment on paper, 30 x 23 in.
“For Weiss, drawing is related to post-language. She does not subscribe to the notion that it is a primal, immediate, prelingual scrawling, and as a result her drawing is a rich infusion of thought, language, ritual, culture, fantasy and emotion. There exists a relationship of drawing and speech and sound that bypasses the written word in Weiss's work.”
- Katherine Carl, “Monika Weiss: Drawing Cosmos” in Monika Weiss-Limen II, Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn, New York, 2005, pp.2-5. To read full text click here.
MONIKA WEISS, Nirbhaya III, 2017, Rubber latex, charcoal, graphite powder, dry pigment on paper, 30 x 23 in.
Image Left: MONIKA WEISS, Nirbhaya III, 2017, Rubber latex, charcoal, graphite powder, dry pigment on paper, 30 x 23 in.
MONIKA WEISS - BIOGRAPHY
Monika Weiss is a New York based Polish-American visual artist and sound composer working in time-based media of music/sound, film/video, installation, and live performance. A significant part of her oeuvre continues to be works on paper. Weiss was trained as a classical pianist at the Warsaw School of Music before studying at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Residency at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in the early 2000s inspired her relocation to New York City. Since 2023 she has been part of The Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art.
Weiss’ work has been presented in more than 100 exhibitions around the world. In 2024, her “Metamorphosis (Przemiana)” was acquired into the permanent collection of the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko. The same year, a sister project, “Metamorphosis (Sound Sculpture),” was commissioned by Laumeier Sculpture Park. Solo museum exhibitions include those at the Museum of Memory & Human Rights, Santiago, Chile; Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami; and the Centre of Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland. In 2004 Weiss’ work was shown in a two-person exhibition with American artist Carolee Schneemann at Remy Toledo Gallery, New York. In 2022, she was part of a historical survey of Polish women artists at A.I.R. Gallery, New York, organized with lokal_30 Gallery, Warsaw. In 2016, her work was included in a survey of contemporary video art at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation in Athens. Currently a member of HyphenHub, an artists and curators organization, she frequently exhibits with the Streaming Museum.
The recipient of numerous awards, she was awarded the 2023 New York State Council on the Arts and the 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts interdisciplinary art fellowships. Weiss’ work has been reviewed by The New York Times, ARTnews, Art in America, Art Nexus, Arte Al Dia, Sculpture Magazine, Prague Post, Obieg and numerous others. Books on her work include a chapter in Guy Brett’s The Crossing of Innumerable Paths: Essays on Art (London: Ridinghouse, 2019) and a bi-lingual monograph, Monika Weiss. Nirbhaya(Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, 2021). Known primarily as an interdisciplinary artist, Weiss has also historically made music records, most recently in 2022 Monika Weiss-Metamorphosis/Nirbhaya was released by Infrequent Seams. Since 2011 the artist holds a professorship at Washington University in St Louis Missouri. Her studio is located in Brooklyn, New York.
MONIKA WEISS, Lethe II, 2023 Resin, water, graphite powder, pencil, dry pigment on paper, 12 x 18 inches
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Katherine Carl is an art historian and curator of the James Gallery and deputy director of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center since 2011. She was Curator of Contemporary Exhibitions at The Drawing Center (2004-2007) when her text above was written.
Dr. Mark McDonald is The Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator of Drawings and Prints. He has curated exhibitions at the British Museum and Museo Nacional del Prado among numerous others and has published widely on the graphic arts.
Buzz Spector is an artist and a widely published critical writer whose essays and reviews have appeared in Afterimage, American Craft, Artforum, and Art on Paper, among others.
Metropolitan Museum of Art presents: Artists on Artworks / Monika Weiss on Francisco Goya, 2021
In this important film, Polish American artist Monika Weiss shares her insights on the work of Spanish artist Francisco Goya and reflects on her own transdisciplinary practice, which investigates relationships between the body and history and evokes rituals of lamentation in response to tragedy. Weiss investigates her art and discusses her drawing practice which is an integral part of her process as an artist and composer.
Monika Weiss artwork © Monika Weiss, courtesy of the artist and Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, National Heritage of Poland Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art oMuseu - Faculdade de Belas Artes Universidade do Porto The Drawing Center, New York Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago de Chile Stavros Niarchos Foundation EMA Experimental Media Arts, University of Arkansas BWA Zielona Góra Hyphen Hub, New York Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montreal, Various private collections.
Credits: Producers: Emma Wegner, Melissa Bell, Editor: Alex Guns, Photography: Paula Lobo, Remote recording engineer: Andrea Theodore, Production Assistant: Anastasiya Gutnik, Special thanks to Monika Weiss and Mark McDonald. © 2021 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
MONIKA WEISS WORKS AVAILABLE, MONOGRAPH, SELECTED REVIEWS
