Monica Rezman USA

Monica Rezman is an American abstract artist whose studio practice is grounded in an exploration of feeling and intimacy within abstraction.

After initially studying as a painter, Rezman expanded her practice to include textiles, drawing, sculpture, photography, and installation. The evolutions in her work across mediums and concepts are intricately tied to her personal life, especially her time traveling and living for long periods in Italy, India, Guatemala, and Mexico, among other places. Incorporating the everyday materials and novel methods connected with specific locations, Rezman has developed an idiosyncratic aesthetic language that speaks to the collective totality of her lived experience.

“I’m a seeker when it comes to making art,” Rezman says.

Several of Rezman’s bodies of work incorporate human hair, including photographs that explore the emotion conveyed in the physical state of a person’s hair style, and abstract paintings and sculptures that incorporate hair as a linear or gestural element in the work. Rezman also frequently works with found cardboard and burlap sacks, building elemental sculptures that straddle a range of visual sensibilities from biomorphism to geometry, evoking a universe populated with abstract, hybrid synthetic-organic forms.

Rezman studied painting and textile design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Instituto Allende in Mexico. She studied classical drawing and painting at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy. In 1999 and 2002, Rezman was awarded an Artist Residency in Gujarat, India. In 2017–18 she was the Artist-in-Residence at the Chicago Artist Coalition’s Field/Work program, as well as Artist-in-Residence at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL. Her work has appeared in New American Painting and has been extensively critically reviewed, including in Hyperallergic, New City, Times of India, Indian Express, and the Chicago Tribune. Her work has been exhibited internationally in many institutions, including at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL; Riverside Art Center, Riverside, IL; Merida English Library, Mérida, Mexico; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Contemporary Art Gallery, Ahmedabad, India; and South Bend Regional Museum of Art, South Bend, IN, among others.