“Art makes me happy. Art enriches the life of people, it opens new views, dimensions and emotions. My passion is sculpture. I create installations, which should lead the audience into a new universe. My animal figures are part of historical paintings, where they play a secondary role to the sitters. In my art the animals perform as the principal actor. Animals are difficult to understand and it is difficult to communicate with them. My glass animals open therefore a new reality, which is different from ours. The sitters in the painting, the animals and the audience of my art perform in a kind of theatrical stage, where the different levels become indistinct. This clash of realities should make us think about the uncertainties of life.” -Marta

Marta Klonowska was born in Warsaw in 1964. She currently lives and works in Düsseldorf. Already during her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland, and later at that of Düsseldorf, glass had become her preferred artistic medium. Today she is known for her numerous canine sculptures that depict the four-legged companions of important historical figures, capturing their natural poses in colored glass. For the subjects of her works, the artist finds inspiration in the paintings of the great masters, in which pets – mostly dogs – are side by side with the subjects, acting almost like prestigious objects that are exhibited as synonyms for wealth and power. To construct these works, she starts with a metal skeleton that is then carefully covered with sharp shards of glass, as in The Morning Walk (2006). She has received such important awards as the 1999 “Artist in Residence” at the Cité International des Arts in Paris and the 2002 “Artist in Residence” at the Akerby Skulpturpark in Sweden. She was also a finalist in the 2006 Bombay Sapphire Prize in London. Among her most recent exhibitions are: And Domestic Animals at the Finnish Glass Museum in Riihimäki (2009) and t.b.a. (2011), and Geschöpfe (2011) at the Lorch + Seidel Galerie in Berlin. Since 2011, one of her works has been on display at the Corning Museum of Glass.