Monika Chlebek (b. 1986) is a Kraków-based painter whose practice draws on everyday scenes, turning them into meditations on the fluid nature of subjectivity – human, animal, and even object. Her works achieve a rare universality: they invite a form of identification that moves beyond species, and even beyond the divide between the animate and the inanimate, as though every figure and object in her compositions might be capable of having a voice.
In her practice, Chlebek gravitates toward figurative motifs, yet the intense close-ups and the fragmentation of the body destabilise any sense of obviousness. A focus on buttocks, fingernails, or a tongue does two things at once – the body becomes radically individualised, and therefore radically easy to identify with, while intimacy is uncovered precisely through the fragment, through a body-part that in the everyday logic of being seen exists only as one component of a larger “system”, stripped of individuality beside other organs and limbs.
Painting as a synesthetic encounter
Through minimalist forms and a predominantly monochromatic palette, the inherently visual medium of painting begins to open itself to other senses. Faced with the isolated body fragments she presents, the viewer becomes hyper-aware of their own – a fingertip recalling one’s fingertips, a lip recalling a remembered kiss. The image might evoke the traits of someone dear, or someone long estranged; Chlebek invites a dialogue with memory, which is rarely linear, rarely tidy. The naked body, stripped of identifying markers and rendered in subtly indeterminate skin tones, becomes a kind of great equaliser – a vessel for recollection, waiting for the viewer to project their own experiences, longings, and histories onto it.
In works such as Zbliżenie (“Close-up”) and To zniknie (“It will disappear”), the artist continues to probe the limits of perception and the fragility of the seen. The first artwork magnifies a fragment of the body to the point where it hovers between abstraction and hyper-intimacy, foregrounding the tensions between proximity, vulnerability, and desire. While To zniknie meditates on the moment just before disappearance: the image feels as if it were slipping out of view, its contours softening, its subject dissolving into memory. Taken together, the two works articulate Chlebek’s ongoing interest in the instability of presence – the way bodies, gestures, and sensations flicker between the recognisable and the uncertain, the intimate and the elusive.
However, the bodies do not always belong to humans. Among Chlebek’s animal subjects, we encounter parrots and rabbits, but it is dogs that occupy a particularly central place in her practice: their teeth, fur, muzzles, and paws recur in numerous close-ups that mirror the intimacy of her human fragments. In works presented in exhibitions such as Animal Show (2021) and Dog Day Afternoon (2023), she isolates a dog’s snout or the tense curve of a jaw, rendering the animal neither sentimental nor symbolic but palpably present, as though caught in a moment of heightened sensation.
But it was the Close Up (2023) exhibition in Miejsce Projektów Zachęty in Warsaw, where she presented most of her dog portraits, as the show alone depicted the subjectivity of those animals and their relation with humans, and as such, also our relation with nature. In all these works, on the one hand, the presence of a tail or the full view of a muzzle confirms the model’s non-human status; while on the other, as in her extreme close-ups of teeth or fur, the distinction becomes less certain.
Intriguingly, human and animal subjects appear side by side within her compositions. Yet this is never a muddled taxonomy. Instead, the uniformity of format and the consistency of her visual language make clear that these works are thematically coherent: the theme is emotion, the rawness of sensory experience, the strata of affect to which we have grown inattentive. Perhaps there is no “human tooth” or “dog tooth” – only teeth, or rather the aggression, fear, or excitement that leads any creature, including ourselves, to bare them.
Creatures of feeling
In some of her most recent works, in which Chlebek turns her attention to plants, the dissolution of taxonomic boundaries persists. Here, titles become decisive: a rudbeckia is named Black-Eyed Susan, a lily with splayed petals becomes somewhat an octopus, while the fleshy bloom of an anthurium becomes nearly erotic, its protruding spadix rendered quietly suggestive.
Her 2025 exhibition W Okamgnieniu (“In the blink of an eye”), inspired by Bolesław Leśmian’s poem W malinowym chruśniaku, presents visually cohesive works bathed in shades of red. Like the source text, the paintings are saturated with eroticism – through colour, through extreme close-ups, through the organic textures of fruit and the stained lips that touch them – yet they retain a kind of innocence, even naivety. The same closeness that intensifies desire also conjures absorption in a moment, a privacy of encounter: eroticism without voyeurism, sensuality without spectacle.
Also, although spiders appear only occasionally in Chlebek’s practice, they function as potent extensions of her ongoing interest in blurring boundaries. But the motif becomes especially visible in W okamgnieniu, where it turns into a kind of camouflaged interplay. The hairy spiders are nestled among ripe fruit and fleshy, petal-like forms, mimicking the surrounding organic textures and colours. Their sudden presence introduces a subtle charge of unease into paintings otherwise saturated with sensuality, complicating the viewer’s encounter with the image. As such, spiders disrupt the scene’s softness, hint at danger or decay, and fold the animal world into the vegetal and the human.
In many ways, Chlebek’s art proposes a counter-taxonomy: a world in which bodies – human, animal, vegetal, or entirely imagined – are united not by appearance but by sensation. What she paints is less the figure than the experience of inhabiting one: the porousness, the vulnerability, the memory embedded in skin and surface. In doing so, she quietly insists that subjectivity is always relational – and always shared.
Chlebek graduated from the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 2011. She has been exhibiting since 2009 and has held ten solo exhibitions across Europe and in Japan, as well as taking part in group exhibitions in e.g. the United States. Her work is currently on view in All the Images Will Disappear at Stain Projects Gallery in Mallorca, Spain, until January 15, and as part of a group show titled The Postcard Exhibition in Sakia Neumann Gallery in Stockholm that’s on view till December 19.
