Monika Wolf was born in Essen, Germany, where she graduated from the Folkwang Hochschule specialising in graphic design. In the 1970s, she visited the United States and Mexico several times, where she came into contact with the history and ritual art of the Native Americans: she became deeply passionate about it and began a long period of documentation and in-depth study.
Back in Europe, she abandoned her job in advertising and devoted herself to the study of art, meeting in person and being contaminated by the work and personality of Joseph Beuys. An influence that we can recognise in some of Wolf’s works, especially in the theme of the shirts that explicitly refer to Beuys’ felt dress and that in the German artist’s intentions recall ghost shirts, the ritual clothing of Native Americans.
The symbolic content of the works – canvases as sacred vestments – is revealed through signs, decorations, figurations borrowed from the study of the originals. A research that focuses on a symbology devoted to the union between spirit and matter, between earthly and supernatural nature and that revives the concept of Mother Nature, the nurturer of all things. This is why some of Wolf’s explicit themes speak of food and the act of love linked to nourishment, family and memory. Memory is also made explicit in the choice of materials, cardboards and papers that she retrieves from their history of use that is now exhausted and which she ennobles with the touch of art, giving them the dignity of a medium that leads to the true essence of things.
Finally, all her work bears the traces of her work as a graphic designer, which includes a real passion for the graphic form of text, an essential element for her informal works, full of moods and poetry. She herself declares that she wants to “write a painting”, a painting that is like writing not controlled by reason, writing that is indecipherable or rendered in reverse, mirrored, preventing immediate reading. A theory of signs that replace drawing, but not communication.
Monika Wolf has been exhibiting since 1977 in Europe and the United States of America. In recent years, her research led her to realize land art projects. Since 1980, she has lived and worked in Milan.
(Thanks to Susanna Vallebona)
