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...
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...
Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...
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...
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...
Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
Epiphany…learnt through hardship is composed of a bronze sculpture depicting the model of the little dancer of Degas, in the pose of a female nude photographed by Edward Weston (Nude, 1936) accompanied by a blue cube...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
Since 2005, Charles Avery has devoted his practice to the perpetual description of a fictional island...
Rosalind Nashashibi’s paintings incorporate motifs drawn from her day-to-day environment, often reworked with multiple variations...
In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...
Part of a larger series of photographic works, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck’s Corrupted file from page 14 (V1) from the series La Vega, Plan Caracas No...
Masks is a series of abstract paintings by Simon Fujiwara that together form a giant, fragmented portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face...
The Fifth Quarter might have taken its mysterious inspiration from the eponymous Stephen King story collated into the Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection...
The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...