Trees and climbing plants, birds and mushrooms, dwellings and stage-set-like interiors: in her painting Monika Michalko (born 1982 in Sokolov, Czech Republic) combines figurative and object-like, organic and ornamental, abstract and architectural elements, interweaving them to produce an organic structure that seems to offer an alternative reality untrammelled by the laws of perspective, gravity or proportion. The specific tonality of her works likewise reinforces their dreamlike quality. Again and again these compositions vaguely recall modernist artists such as Paul Klee, Kazimir Malevich, Giorgio de Chirico, Odilon Redon or James Ensor. Her paintings are complex hidden picture puzzles: shapes and colours completely fill the available space, and new micro-narratives can be discovered again and again
