Monica Petzal was born in London to German Jewish refugee parents in 1953. She took an MA in Art History at Sussex University and subsequently trained in her home city, first as a painter at the Royal College of Art and then as a printmaker at Camberwell School of Art. Co-founder of the charity, The Foundation for Women’s Art, and an extremely versatile and experimental artist, Petzal is intensely interested in her German Jewish heritage and in the theme of migration; her work continues to explore her family history and the forces of conflict which have shaped the cities of Coventry and Dresden, both heavily bombed during the Second World War.
Painter, printmaker and art historian, Monica Petzal was born in 1953 in London to German Jewish refugee parents who had emigrated from Dresden in 1936. She grew up in north west London close to Hampstead Heath. After studying painting at Kingston Polytechnic (previously Kingston School of Art), she took an MA in Art History at Sussex University under noted art historian, Norbert Lynton, continuing to the Royal College of Art in London in 1978, where she studied painting under Peter de Francia. Aged 28, she emerged as an artist, an art critic and, shortly afterwards, as a university lecturer, the latter two pursuits to make a living. In 1992, she co-founded, with artist Belinda Harding, the charity, The Foundation for Women’s Art (FWA), with the objective of increasing public knowledge and understanding of women artists. The organisation, which attracted widespread support from the art establishment, as well as funding from the Arts Council, proposed the founding of a Museum of Women's Art (MWA) in London. As the first of a series of events planned during a three-year development phase of the project, in 1994 the FWA organised the exhibition Reclaiming the Madonna: Artists As Mothers, which included works by acclaimed artists such as Eileen Cooper, Sandra Fisher (represented in the Ben Uri Collection) and Laetitia Yhap. To accompany the exhibition the FWA also launched an educational programme with a one-day symposium entitled ‘Creativity and Motherhood’, with eminent art historian Griselda Pollock among the speakers. The proposal of a museum entirely devoted to female artists caused much debate in the press, with supporters declaring that the art world was male-dominated and therefore female artists needed patronage, while opponents considered this a ‘patronising’ approach (https://cutt.ly/mRevZZt). The FWA closed in 2006, when Petzal felt that ‘the issues had moved on’ (https://monicapetzal.com/about/).
Over the years, Petzal became increasingly fascinated by the medium of print and in 1999 enrolled in a two year MA in printmaking at Camberwell School of Art . She subsequently showed her work more extensively, and it was more widely collected by museums and private collectors. Petzal also selected, spoke and wrote about, and curated print exhibitions, including co-curating Process and Innovation, British Printmaking Japan at the Kyoto Museum in 2012. In 2006 she set up her own gallery in Hampstead, Printroom, which was later transferred to Suffolk where she relocated in 2014. Petzal is intensely interested in her German Jewish heritage. In her body of prints The Dresden Project she has explored not only her maternal family’s history, but also the forces of conflict and change which have particularly shaped the cities of Coventry and Dresden, both of which were heavily bombed during the Second World War. In 2019–2020 Petzal worked on Dissent and Displacement, a body of prints exploring the themes of opposition, persecution and persistence, inspired by her German Jewish heritage and the German Expressionist collection in Leicester’s New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, where the exhibition was held in 2020. In the display, Petzal charted journeys of migration, including that made by her maternal Jewish grandparents, beginning in East Prussia, through to the recent arrival of a Syrian refugee doctor in Leicester. Using original sources, Petzal brought together contemporary collaged and painterly lithographic prints with accessible descriptive text, as well as German expressionist work from her own collection, archive objects, photographs, and film. For several years Petzal also carried out interviews which were recorded for the British Library, including with gallerists, Annely Juda, John Kasmin and Leslie Waddington, and her former professor, Norbert Lynton. From 2009 to 2016 Petzal was a Trustee of the Printmakers Council. She is currently Vice Chair of the Dresden Trust, a charity that works on reconciliation between Britain and Saxony in Germany. Following the referendum on membership of the European Union, as a symbolic gesture, Petzal applied for, and obtained, her German citizenship.
Petzal’s work is held in various public collections including Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry. A series of six large drawings are displayed at Sugar Quay House in London. On 7 May 2021, Petzal presented 'Memory, Time and Printmaking', describing her her work and creative practice at the symposium 'Migration, Memory and the Visual Arts: Second-Generation (Jewish) Artists', hosted online by the University of Leicester.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Monica Petzal]
Publications related to [Monica Petzal] in the Ben Uri Library