Monika has been working with exclusively expired pharmaceutical-medical material since 2018, creating large-scale, color-intensive works that evoke cosmic processes and biochemical reactions.
Triggered by her mother‘s early Alzheimer´s diagnosis, the idea for this work overrules color theory. „Red and yellow do not have to result in orange, it can equally result in green,“ says the artist. Kus-Picco has developed an artistic approach within the informal that has never been seen before in this way and, above all, in this consequence. Apart from the painting´s ground layer, her works are all of medical origin.
With her unique technique, she uses interdisciplinary research on the dividing line between the natural sciences and art. She extracts and pulverizes her colors from expired products of the pharmaceutical industry, such as tablets and tinctures. She applies the pigments gained in this way to the canvas using solvents – also from the medical field. Pigments that are intended to change our lives in depression, anxiety, dementia. Her works are intended to draw attention to the mass sale of brightly colored pills, as well as to gender medicine – which is only hesitantly gaining importance – or a substance that started a second sexual revolution.
In her works, she visualizes invisible processes and the way different medications work, as well as she explores the connections between social systems, genders, and regional-cultural differences in medicine, and establishes a connection to life stories and fates.
Exhibitions (selection only)
2024 Danubiana Meulensteen Art Meuseum / Slovakia, Solo Show
2024 Albertina Klosterneuburg, Austria
2024 Spark Art Fair, Vienna
2024 Artist in Residence, Brasil
2022 Personale Museum Osthaus Hagen/Düsseldorf, Germany, Solo Show
2022 59 th Biennale di Venezia, Personal Structures, Palazzo Bembo
2022 Albertina Wien, Andy Warhol bis Cecily Brown, Vienna
Projects for Public Spaces & Permanent Exhibitions
Ministry of Integration and Women’s Affairs, Vienna, Austria
Austrian Embassy in Paris, permanent exhibition
Justizzentrum, (Centre of Justice), Vienna
Gestaltung des Eingangsbereiches der B+M Zentrale, Vienna