Jonathan Monk
collection

Artist
Jonathan Monk

Title
bundle

Year of creation
From 2001

Year of acquisition
2006

Acquisition of the foundation

The British artist Jonathan Monk is known for his humor and slightly quirky approach to conceptual art and has been meandering through the landscape of 20th century art since the early 90s. With an eye for obscure details from art history, he meets Piet Mondrian in a tree, pushes Robert Barry around on sheets of paper and puts Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman or Dan Flavin in the corner.

As these works demonstrate, Monk's artistic "signature" is as ephemeral and ironic as in his early work "My Name Written in Piss" (1993), in which the artist urinated his name on the sand. Perhaps his signature is that there is no obvious signature in his incongruent and diverse oeuvre. It is a non-dogmatic work that includes objects, photographs, neon works, slide and 16mm projections as well as text works and drawings. Here, quasi-industrial forms borrowed from Minimal Art, such as "Corner Piece (for Dan Flavin)" (2005) or "Corner Piece (for Alighiero Boetti)" (2005), are juxtaposed with completely different works, such as the blurred film projection of a jumping color spot in " Searching for the center of a sheet of 40 colored sheets of layout paper while looking out of the window 1/2" (2002) or the translation of the sentence "33. It is difficult to bungle a good idea" in " Between here and there (in progress)" (2005).

At once playful and nostalgic, the artist Monk is less interested in deconstructing art history through his gentle appropriation than in examining the phenomena of reproduction and repetition; His aim is to take up historical ideas again in the context of the present and to plunder, lengthen and expand them. He wants to feel history and make it tangible; he wants to add biographical details, biological fluids and social references to formalistic relics. He does not aim to reduce theories and ideas to the level of everyday life, but rather sees theory and everyday life as an inseparable team. Jonathan Monk, says Stephan Berg, is not a cold-blooded surgeon who exposes the various tendencies of 20th century art in order to declare them dead. Rather, he is a romantic who "brings them to a contradictory life in his special way."