Monica Kim Garza (b. 1988) is an American painter of Korean and Mexican descent with a BFA in painting and drawing from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited at the Museum of Sex in New York, the Taubman Museum of Art and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. With fast, gestural brushwork she paints carefree women of colour of all shapes and sizes who lounge, eat, sunbathe or play sports, calmly meeting the viewer’s gaze.
Monica Kim Garza (b. 1988, Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA) is an American painter of Korean and Mexican descent who grew up in Georgia. She earned a BFA in painting and drawing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Garza is known for paintings of carefree women of colour of all shapes and sizes, deliberately ethnically and racially ambiguous, who lounge, eat, drink, smoke, sunbathe and play sports while calmly returning the viewer’s gaze. According to her gallery, the women in her pictures are all versions of a single protagonist – the artist herself. Her fast, gestural brushwork lets figures and surroundings merge, and critics have compared her work with Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings and Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, although her attitude towards the tradition of Western oil painting is looser and more irreverent. Her work has been included in exhibitions such as “NSFW: Female Gaze” at the Museum of Sex in New York (2017–2018), “A Very Anxious Feeling” at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia (2020–2021) and “i know you are, but what am i?” at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (2022–2023). In 2021 she had the solo exhibition “Baguettes” at The Hole in New York, and she has also been represented by KÖNIG GALERIE. The oil painting “Jogging Partner” (2020), offered by TUMO Gallery, belongs to her series of women engaged in everyday leisure and sport.
