Jonathan Monk re-fashions and re-examines seminal works of Conceptual and Minimal art through witty, ingenious, and irreverent means. Through wall paintings, monochromes, ephemeral sculpture, and photography, Monk reflects on the tendency of contemporary art to canabilize references, while paying homage to figures such as Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman and Lawrence Weiner. Monk’s art practice does not follow any specific style; it doesn’t contain any common characteristic to identify his work at first glance. The amount and variety of his works poses questions about what supports them. Demystifying the creative process, Monk often employs appropriation, humor, irony, and anecdote in his work. To enter an exhibition of works by Jonathan Monk is like taking part in a treasure hunt, made up of digressions and space-time manipulations.
In Made In Heaven , we are face to face with a sculptural apparition, a divine visitation in the artist’s studio...
At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...
White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...
In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...
The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...
Wagon Wheel is a work with a fundamental dynamism that derives both from the rotating movement of the elements suspended on poles and the kicking of the legs of the figure...
Beyond the White Walls , with a commentary written and spoken by Jeremy Deller, is often wryly amusing...
Masks is a series of abstract paintings by Simon Fujiwara that together form a giant, fragmented portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...