GALINA MUNROE | KATHARINA ARNDT
Double solo show | GALINA MUNROE "Ode to Vivian" | KATHARINA ARNDT "My Happy Place"

Patricia Armocida Gallery is pleased to present the double solo exhibition of: 

Galina Munroe "ODE TO VIVIAN "

Katharina Arndt "MY HAPPY PLACE"

 

 

Galina Munroe, is a young British-French artist. 

The large canvases made by Galina Munroe, who’ll have her first solo exhibition at the gallery, blend oil painting and collage, figuration and abstraction. Her subjects are simplified floral arrangements, in playful almost childlike shapes, with vibrant colors.

These floral still lifes are delicate symbols of her “inner garden”, as well as an artistic means to rebel against the age-old esthetic hierarchy that privileges certain forms of art over others based on gender biases. 

 

Flowers have historically been considered a very suitable subject for women with artistic aspirations, since they are frivolous and safe. Women were forbidden to study anatomy as nude models were deemed inappropriate for them, and women were considered to be lacking in knowledge and strength of imagination to paint historical or mythological scenes. 

Hence, flowers stood as the stronghold of a prejudiced devaluation of women’s work in art.

Munroe intentionally mocks this distinction between serious and frivolous, masculine and feminine, turning her still lifes into an invitation for women to enter the art world and demand their place. These flowers also represent her inner garden, revealing her hopes, sorrows, and affections.

Her works are like a therapeutic journey in which the artist learns to love herself and be more compassionate with herself while exploring boundaries and vulnerabilities. And viewers are invited to take this same journey. 

 

Katharina Arndt, who grew up in East Germany, remembers the thrilling kaleidoscope of consumerism that ensued after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Recollecting her first childhood visit to the West, she said: “I remember all the colors and I don’t know how many different kinds of chocolate bars.” Arndt acts as an outside observer: her quick, colorful paintings satirize the mass consumerist aesthetic of our contemporary society, reflecting on daily life in the digital age. Her works, with their lively and whimsical subjects, conceal traces of an unfiltered reality, reminding viewers that the images we are presented with are often moments captured out of context, constructed to be shared.

Perhaps even more powerful than the “real” life Arndt smuggles into her paradisal scenes, are the painful realities lurking beyond the frame. In the same warm Mediterranean water where many of her subjects play, refugees struggle and suffer in unprecedented numbers.

The plastic cups that girls drink cheap mojitos from on the beach will find their way into oceans or landfills. A devastating war is waged on the same continent as the sunbathing European tourists she depicts.

In Arndt’s paintings, life’s fleeting pleasures are met with enthusiasm and gratitude, but always held in tension with the uneven way they are experienced, both in our personal lives and in respect to our broader privilege. 

The artist’s intent is not to denigrate the hedonistic escapism of her subjects, but rather to implicate herself in the complex dynamics she interrogates in her work by inserting herself as a subject in many of her paintings. Representing "islands of respite," moments of lightness in the chaotic and complicated dynamics of life.

To see both the joy and the irony that are woven into the little moments of levity that act as a means of relief from the troubling realities of life. Brief moments when we can be free of our daily anxieties, both big and small, and find a way to embrace it all in its dissonant fullness.                                                                                                     

“My hope for my work is that people smile and have the opportunity to reflect about the superficiality of it all. That’s my goal.”

 

 

Biographies

 

 

Galina Munroe, is a British-French artist (born in 1993), lives and works in Norwich, UK.  She obtained her BA in Fine Arts from Beaux Arts, EESAB in Rennes, France in 2014, and her MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins University of Arts in London in 2016.                                        

Her recognizable visual style is the result of a simplistic formal vocabulary of bright colors and layers of oil paint and fabric collage on canvas. 

 

“I don’t approach new work with pre-meditated sketches or ideas for a motif, instead I take cues from the materials I work with, such as a pre-existing fold or smudge on the canvas”. 

This fluid and spontaneous approach is reflected in the impression of freshness of her paintings, encouraging viewers to direct their attention inwards. Munroe has developed a language of visual phrases that frequently recur; suggestions of voluminous flowers, plants, fruits, all elements that recollect the rural countryside, the artist’s primary working environment.

 

Solo shows                                                                                                               

2024, LOTTE Gallery, Love Me Till I Am Me Again, South Korea; 2023, JARILAGER Gallery, Bruised Dawn, Cologne, Germany; 2022, Piermarq, Tending to the Tender Things, Sydney, Australia; C O U NTY, Things that make you want to stay, US; 2021, UNION Gallery, The King of Carrot Flowers, London, UK; Piermarq, The Silence Tasters, Sydney, Australia; 2020, Piermarq, To emerge in a different place, Sydney, Australia; 2019, Piermarq Gallery, Orville,Sydney, Australia.

 

 

Some Group Shows                                                                                                 

2023, Piermarq at Zona MACO 2023, Piermarq, MX; JARILAGER Gallery, Art Busan, Busan, South Korea; UNION Gallery, LAF, London, UK; 2022, JARILAGER Gallery, Weeds Won’t Wither, Cologne, Germany; UNION Gallery, Still Standing, London, UK; Galerie Slika, Dream Paper, a group show curated by Jérémie Masurel, France; Piermarq, PINK, Sydney, Australia; 2021, Delphian Gallery, Dandelion, UK; Delphian Gallery, 4 Year Anniversary, UK; NBB Dallery, NBB x Zora Auguste, Berlin, Germany; Roman Sviridov Gallery, Puzzle, Italy; Fran Reus Gallery, Palma Art Fair, Majorca, Spain; Galeria Trinta, Brindar con extraños, group, Spain; 2020, Online group exhibition curated by Kristin Texeira, Soothe; Piermarq, Work on paper, Sydney, Australia; Auc Art Auction, Sensations, Online; 2019, Bricks Gallery, TWENTYFOUR, Copenhagen,Denmark; Piermarq, Spring Patterns, Sydney, Australia.  

 

 

Katharina Arndt (*1981, Oschatz) lives and works between Berlin and Barcelona. From 2000 to 2005 she studied Fine Arts at Braunschweig School of Art in Germany, and in 2006 she obtained her Master of Fine Arts with John Armleder (*1948), a Swiss multi-talented conceptual artist, performance and object artist, painter, sculptor and art critic.

She expresses herself through a reflection on language and esthetics of the digital age. The recurring theme in her art is “superficiality” within the paradox of the hyperreal, immaterial online world that transforms consumers into products. Hence, the artist transposes the esthetics and language of the virtual world into material creations on artificial media: canvas with PU laquer priming and Neons. Her works depict archetypal characters socially involved in the consumeristic system who become symbolic figures: they often wear sunglasses or headphones and are looking at cell phones, they’re socially active yet totally isolated. The landscapes are ephemeral and volatile: we often see palm trees, blue skies, and brightly colored airplanes that allude to consumer wellbeing in its ephemeral form.

Katharina Arndt’s works are currently part of the collections of Saatchi Gallery, London, UK and Sammlung Haupt, Berlin, Germany.

 

Solo Shows                                                                                                           

2025, VIN Gallery, A beautiful day, Shanghai, China; Garden of the Zodiac, All I ever wanted, Omaha, US; 2024-2023, MAP Gallery, Preferred conditions, Berlin, Germany; Artual Gallery, Don’t call me Babe, Beirut, Lebanon; Station Gallery, Divas after work, Bratislava, Slovakia; Mott Projects, While waiting for death, New York, US; Redd Gallery, Hot guys, hot chicks, hot pants, Chania, Greece; Vin Gallery, Whoop Whoop, Saigon, Vietnam; Kanya Kage, Welcome to the Pleasure Dome, Berlin, Germany; 2022-2021, Unit 1 Gallery, You look so good at night, London, UK; Gallery Uxval Gochez, Forever young, Barcelona, Spain; SommerFrischeKunst, Private BEACH, Bad Gastein, Austria; Fang Studio, Never not pretending, Leipzig, Germania; Framed, EASY EASY, Berlin, Germany; 2020, Strayfield Gallery, Faye Dunaway on Monday, Copenaghen, Denmark. 

 

Group Shows

2025, Feinkunst Krüger, Horsing around, Hamburg, Germany; Galerie Maia Muller, Self portraits, Paris, France; 2024, Pamplemousse Gallery, Best of show, Richmond, US; TAM - Tokyo Art Museum, Animals, Tokyo, Japan; Kuckei Kuckei, Primavera, Palma, Spain; 2023, MEWO Kunsthalle, Speaking in Colors, Memmingen, Germany; Galleria Patricia Armocida, Pelle, Milan, Italy; GÄRNA ART, Summer time, Madrid, Spain; Collectors Room, Jupiter II, Hamburg, Germany; 2022, Artual Gallery, Unprecedented Reality, Beirut, Lebanon; Garden of the Zodiac, Animals, Omaha, US; Museum Bread and Art, From still life to food porn, Ulm, Germany. 

 

 

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