Black and White Broken Bodies #1 Painting

Mona Osman found her artistic side in her early childhood in painting and drawing. She has been always interested in people and depicting interaction between two figures. Her paintings were often influenced by personal experiences too. Lately her main interest is about juxtaposing and analysing the relation between figure and its environment. In 2012 she started working on series of painting, called Black and White Broken Bodies. Influenced by Piet Mondrian, she restricted herself to the use of mainly yellow, red, blue, black and white. The scenery was based on the following concept; black and white coloured bodies with missing limbs in a colourful space. She aimed to invent a language through repetitive symbols. The idea was to juxtapose simplicity of the human being in a much more complex space. The paintings usually depicted figures with no hands and or no legs. These figures were to symbolise the helplessness of the human beings. Her thinking process developed when she began to explore notions about being of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche and Friedrich Hegel. This is when she started her new set of works called Throwness. In these images Mona is working around the feeling of anxiety that comes from our limited capability of understanding being as such. Her work focuses on the unpleasant feeling of helplessness. Paintings such as Freedom of Choice or Chained by the Image are to express anxiety of our existence. She is experimenting both with the visual narrative and the roughness of the texture by using liquid latex and other 3D elements in her paintings. Despite the influence of Mondrian, Osman’s approach is not focusing on the objective. On the contrary, she emphasizes the importance of the subjective. Mona Osman was born in Hungary in 1992. She spent her childhood in Budapest, later in Nice, in France and finished high school in London. She graduated in 2014, in BA Fine Arts at Goldsmiths University of London.