Monica Metsers
Monica’s work reflects a lifelong infatuation with fantasy and the surreal. She loves painting objects, people and places and works in layers of oil paint, building up different thicknesses to create a sculptural and dreamlike effect. She also enjoys working in pencil, graphite and print. Her intention is to create works that highlight the surreal magic of the everyday.
Monica Metsers was born in 1980 in Wellington, New Zealand, but has lived in the English Lake District for the majority of her life. Monica graduated from the University of Dundee with a Masters Degree in Fine Art in 2005 and has been steadily exhibiting and selling her work nationally since then. In 2007 she was short-listed for the Celeste Art Prize and in 2011 was shortlisted for New Lights/The Valeria Sykes Prize for young painters, and was awarded second prize from around 400 entries for regional art prize ‘Open Up North’. In 2012 Monica exhibited alongside artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Turner Prize nominee George Shaw in ‘Francis Bacon to Paula Rego: Great Artists’ at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. In 2016 she was shortlisted for Cumbrian Artist of The Year, and in 2017 her work went on a major museum tour of China with the Contemporary British Painting collective. Her works are now in numerous private and public collections.