“Beauty without a filter: how Monica Cook is breaking visual taboos.”

Monica Cook's works are like a mirror into which not everyone dares to look. They frighten and mesmerize, repel and attract at the same time. This is art on the edge of biological and philosophical, where slime and sweat are as expressive elements as color and form. It is impossible to forget them after the first glance. Where is the line between the beautiful and the repulsive, between art and anatomical shock? This article is an immersion into the world of an artist whose work cannot be perceived neutrally.

Monica Cook was born in 1974 in Georgia, USA. She graduated from Savannah College of Art in 1996 and then went on to study at the High School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she still lives today.

Monica is an artist who is not afraid to be “uncomfortable” or misunderstood. Her style is realistic, even hyper-realistic, but her subjects are often strange and disturbing. She depicts people and animals in unexpected, almost grotesque poses, often covered in slime, sweat, or other strange fluids. These images may shock, but leave no one indifferent.

“The desire to learn new things drives me, helps in comprehending new things. The more I learn, the more questions I have. The longer I make art, the further I delve into my roots and childhood. Whether I'm comprehending art or life itself, for me these are the two most sacred places where I can be as honest as I can be.” - Monica Cook quote

Cook works figuratively, creating paintings, sculptures, and video projects that combine human and animal corporeality, physiology, and elements of surrealism. Her work is often shocking or aesthetically disturbing: distorted faces, strange symbioses between human and animal - it all seems to be both reality and dream.

“While painting, I enter into a relationship with the subject. It is very difficult to isolate yourself from past experiences and create something new. When a sketch of, let's say, a fish or an octopus appears in a painting, I start refining the details until the object becomes unfamiliar to me, when I can see it in a new light. People would like my work to be clearer, easier to read, but I have a very different goal, which is to find something magical in the mundane and explore it further, much deeper.”

Unlike classical surrealists such as Salvador Dali, Cook hardly ever veers into symbolism or abstraction. Her work is closer to contemporary hyperrealism, like Ron Mueck's, but with the added unsettling, frightening absurdity characteristic of the work of Patrizia Piccinini or Francis Bacon, where the human body becomes an arena of suffering, desire or mutation.

Some of her works are reminiscent of the art of Janie Saville, known for her rough, monumental paintings, or Marina Abramović, if the latter had expressed her ideas not through performance but through canvas, paint and brush.

In 2013, Monica Cook's exhibition entitled Milk Fruit was held at Postmasters Gallery in New York. This exhibition was one of the artist's most ambitious works, presenting a series of sculptures and installations organized into processions of fantastical creatures and wagons.

These sculptures were accompanied by various animals such as chickens, goats and exotic birds, creating the atmosphere of a post-apocalyptic carnival.

The Milk Fruit exhibition received positive reviews from critics and viewers, who noted Cook's unique approach to combining organic and inorganic materials, as well as her ability to evoke a sense of both delight and discomfort in viewers.

The peculiarity of Cook's approach is her desire to show the hidden animal side of human nature. In every detail - be it a drop of sweat, the movement of a pupil or the tightness of a muscle - there is something unsettling and primal. Cook brings to the surface what we try to hide in everyday life.

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