Monika Furmana

In my artistic practice I explore how control becomes embodied in the female body. Working with painting and collage, I use fragments from outdated magazines, digital imagery, mythology, and art history—images already circulating within systems of representation. By cutting, layering, and repainting them on canvas, I construct figures that appear fragmented, hybrid, and unstable. At the center of my work lies the tension between autonomy and regulation. I am interested in how external structures of authority become internal forms of self‐control and how they shape bodily experience. Growing up in post‐Soviet Eastern Europe shaped my sensitivity to ideological legacy. In contemporary image culture, control becomes diffuse—it forms identity through repetition and the internalized gaze. Collage introduces structure and selection, while painting disrupts it through gesture, chance, and intuition. I perceive the canvas as a psychological space where images are transformed. My paintings become a site where control is reconsidered and destabilized, opening space for a shifting, undefined subjectivity.