An artist at the crossroads of Europe and Asia

Born in 1977 in Poland, Monika Cicolella is a French-Polish artist. Graduated from the Warsaw School of Economics with an MA in Political Sciences and Economics, she followed a rich academic path that led her from Warsaw to Luzern, Berlin, Paris and London, where she started to study Art History on her own. After a few years working for different international companies in Paris, she settled in Shanghai in 2012. There, he discovered calligraphy and Chinese ink painting: she trained with Chinese masters and decided to devote herself entirely to her passion for art.

She exhibited her first series in 2013 through several individual and collective exhibitions in China, followed by various Art projects and exhibitions in Europe from 2017. In parallel, her extensive travelling in Asia, in Australia and in North America enabled her to discover different cultures and original forms of expression from Nature, which continue until now to nurture her artistic approach and her work about the energy of trees. She now lives and works in Lyon, France. Monika Cicolella is an Akoun-listed artist since 2023.

Through her creations, Monika Cicolella explores how we connect to the universe and the energies that surround us.

Too often, these connections are reduced to digital and social networks. However, since prehistory, humans have always been connected: to their environment, to their fellow human beings, to themselves, to their beliefs and to their own culture. Today, what are we really connected to ? How are these connections made ? Do they evolve in time and space ? Are they specific to each individual ? Can we choose our connections, and therefore our disconnections ? What happens when you are connected ? Is it an experience that you can share ?

Monika Cicolella seeks answers through the prism of her own connections.

Taking advantage of her rich academic background, her extensive travelling, her deep knowledge of History of Art, her dreamy and sparkling personality as well as her very intimate relationship with all forms of expression coming from Nature, Monika Cicolella transforms the energy and the emotions that she has gathered into semi-abstract paintings, full of energy, that everyone should be able to experience and understand.

In the series Interconnection, she shows the intensity of a special moment that she experienced in Central Park in New York. In the series Energy of Trees, she pays tribute to the energy and well-being offered by trees and Nature in general. In the series Interior Light, she explores the connection to oneself and the special relationship between our inner life and the expression of it through our body.

Through the poetry of her works and the philosophical reflections that support them, the artist invites the viewer to question his own connections.

Combining her European and Asian influences, Monika Cicolella offers an original, luminous and vibrant painting, full of energy.

In each of her paintings, she combines the traditional Chinese technique, based on breathing, the energy of the gesture and the "dance" of the brush on the paper, with her Western influences, made of bright colors, elaborate compositions and subtle references to European masters of painting such as Chagall, Dufy, Miró and de Staël.

In the series Energie des Arbres, inspired notably by the gardens of writers, artists and philosophers with whom she feels a special bond, Monika Cicolella reinterprets in her own way the traditional motif of blossom trees in a style balancing between figuration and abstraction. If the branches, drawn with a single brush stroke, remain recognizable, the flowers have become light, bright and sparkling bubbles. Like a decor intended to highlight the main subject, the background is applied last, with gouache or watercolor, giving the work a special vibration, as an invitation to poetry and reverie.

In order to stay connected to the purity of Nature, Monika Cicolella uses as much as possible materials and tools of natural origin, such as ink, paper, wood, charcoal, porcelain or natural pigments.