Born in 1986 in Kraków, Monika Chlebek graduated from the Fine Art Academy of Kraków in 2011 with a degree in painting. She has exhibited extensively throughout Poland, as well as a solo show in Japan and group shows in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy. Primarily a painter, Chlebek's practice centers around figurative motifs such as animals, people, and objects, elements of reality in her everyday life which attract her attention. She follows her intuition, working from what is immediate and intimate to her but endeavoring to synthesize from it a universally accessible visual language with which to speak to universal experiences. Chlebek's process involves the distillation of reality, stripping down the excess off fragments of life to yield pure motifs, naked of context, allowing for direct engagement free of presumption or preconception. Chlebek takes advantage of this resultantly spare iconography, juxtaposing disparate images to construct new narratives.