With her painting, Mona Koliwer aimed to convey moods, abstract figurative elements, combine color contexts, and improvise silhouettes.
Her abstract paintings were created using color specifications determined by her. Mona Koliwer simply began painting without having an image in mind, acting spontaneously "from the gut." Only when she stepped back could she then consciously give form to the randomly created image or paint over it in multiple layers to achieve abstraction.
Mona Koliwer's path to painting arose from the need to realize her own ideas and be inspired by color.
Her beginnings in painting involved naturalistic works, landscapes, portraits, and nudes. Mona Koliwer later turned to abstraction.
Mona Koliwer was self-taught. To meet her own standards, she took private lessons from painters and attended workshops and courses at the Academy of Fine Arts.
Since the 1990s, Mona Koliwer has exhibited regularly in solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad. At the same time, she worked on terracotta figures. These are similar in character to her paintings and were another form of artistic expression.
In her final years, she lived in Bremen, where she died on July 7, 2025.