Monica Shulman

Monica Shulman is a self-taught photographer and artist whose brand of gestural abstraction and diverse mark making is a form of storytelling. She is known for her elaborate impasto technique that creates heavily layered and sculptural surfaces, and her world is best described as colourful and rhythmic. Shulman engages the medium itself as a participant in both her abstract and figurative works. Exploring themes of the human condition, identity, and self-reflection, her intuitive work is process-oriented and she learns best through experimentation. A first generation American of Cuban and Argentinian descent, who left her career as an attorney to focus on her art practice full time, Monica lives and works in the Lower Hudson Valley with her husband and their children.

She says: “My practice denotes freedom and unapologetic honesty. Using gestural abstraction as storytelling, my work explores subjective personal themes of duality such as love, rejection, family, isolation, chaos, calm, flawed beauty and perfection. Abstraction feels liberating and there’s no fixed narrative so the story can change at any moment. I work to provoke a vivid, emotional response, but also leave an impression of uncertainty.”

More from Shulman at monicashulman.com