About the artist
Paula
Mosica
Paula Mosica’s current practice centres on monumental figurative drawing and the contemporary potential of historical sacred imagery.
Working primarily with charcoal, she draws from the visual density of Renaissance and Northern Renaissance prints, translating their compressed compositions, dramatic contrasts and psychological intensity into large-scale works made for physical encounter.
Her drawings move between precise figuration and dissolution, controlled modelling and spontaneous gesture, dense darkness and exposed paper. Biblical figures and narratives are approached not as fixed historical icons, but as living images carrying centuries of accumulated visual, spiritual and cultural memory.
The work asks what these inherited images can still reveal about human vulnerability, faith, transformation, collective behaviour and moral responsibility when experienced from the present.
Practice
Drawing as a physical encounter.
Charcoal is central to Mosica’s practice because it allows precision and instability to coexist within the same image. Dense modelling can dissolve into abrasion, erased passages, exposed paper and spontaneous marks, keeping the drawing physically open throughout its construction.
Scale is equally important. At dimensions approaching the human body, the drawings are no longer encountered as small representations but as presences. Distance reveals composition and mass; proximity reveals individual lines, charcoal dust, pressure, erasure and the physical history of their making.