Medicine Cabinet 2022

Since the beginning of 2018, Monika Kus-Picco has been working exclusively with a wide variety of expired medicines, which she uses ground up like colour pigments. She also uses medicinal products as solvents, which influence the brightness and opacity and create very special structures as they trickle away. Here her work is related to the action painting of a Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionism of a Helen Frankenthaler. Beyond the painterly process, however, her work is much more anchored in life, in the existential.

"Art is able to lead people into their own soul landscape. I consciously try to explore and transcend boundaries in my work. Boundaries that have been imposed on us physically, psychologically or conventionally. For this, painting serves me as a medium." (Monika Kus-Picco)

The colours of the paintings are closely related to different destinies and life stories and the remedies that are used for certain illnesses or themes. Monika Kus-Picco has made the interesting discovery that this colourfulness is indeed a national one, because one and the same remedy can have a completely different colouring in another country than it does here in Austria.

"The pharmaceutical material, which has deep associations, gives rise to completely new worlds of colour. The invisible modes of action of medicines are visualised and given a visible form that is reminiscent of cosmic processes. Medicine is not depicted, it depicts itself." (Hermann Nitsch)