I recently spent a few days in Paris and caught up with painter Katarina Monnier, whom I haven't seen since 1996. That was the year of her only exhibition in Hong Kong and she was then a mother of two and a painter/sculptor living in Sri Lanka, where her husband ran a textile firm.
How things have changed in six years. Now Monnier is a mother-of-three, back in her native Paris (she lives in the suburb of Fontainbleau), and is pursuing painting full-time with exhibitions in the French capital, London and beyond.
Although her abstract works have sold well in Europe, Monnier has always thought about coming back to Hong Kong and this time, with a little help from restaurateur and fashion designer Nichole Garnaut (who also helped Monnier co-ordinate her first exhibition at the now defunct Lan Kwai Fong Gallery), Monnier is testing the market with an exhibition which opens at Zee Stone Gallery next week.
The one thing that hasn't changed is her approach to art through spirituality. Monnier laughs as she speculates that the many years she has spent absorbing Buddhist teachings may have inspired her to strive for tranquility and balance in her work.
Living in Sri Lanka wasn't easy, she was sick often and her health deteriorated so badly she almost died. Perhaps this changes a person, because there is a sense of vibrancy, a sense of life maybe, in what appear to be sensual abstract landscapes.
Calm mornings, breezy autumn evenings and magnificent sunsets all figure in her works, and for the first time, Monnier teaches me how to 'read' an abstract landscape. The colours represent the image in her head, the bars (colour blocks) in the work are her way of tracking the passage of time, and the thick scratch marks on the thinly applied oil paint are a way of pure self-expression.
