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 (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
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...
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...
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...
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...
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 film Line Describing a Cone was made in 1973 and it was projected for the first time at Fylkingen (Stockholm) on 30 August of the same year...
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...
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources...
Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...