Jonathan Monk

The ‘Exhibit Model Details with Additional Information’ are installation views of former exhibitions. Three-dimensional artwork editions and everyday objects belonging to popular culture are added to the photographic support, makinga new collage/composition opening up for new interpretations. Several time periods and sensations are presented simultaneously and overlap each other. According to the artist: ’This particular series of works does (kind of) feed from itself. Images of them installed may even become wallpaper within the Exhibit Model series and they potentially become part of this series again. Vanishing into the documentation of documentation.
British artist Jonathan Monk replays, recasts and re-examines seminal works of Conceptual and Minimal art by variously witty, ingenious and irreverent means.
Speaking in 2009, he said, “Appropriation is something I have used or worked with in my art since starting art school in 1987. At this time (and still now) I realised that being original was almost impossible, so I tried using what was already available as source material for my own work.”
Through wall paintings, monochromes, ephemeral sculpture and pho- tography he reflects on the tendency of contemporary art to devour ref- erences, simultaneously paying homage to figures such as Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman and Lawrence Weiner, while demystifying the creative process.

I am hoping it becomes an endless circle.’
When asked about his particularrelation with John Baldessari, Monk confessed he considers Baldessari as a kind of ‘godfather’ figure that had a great influence on his art making. In Monk’s opinion, Baldessari is an artist who managed to’ create a perfect collaboration between serious comedy and funny conceptualism - a kind of American Monty Python....’.
Jonathan Monk’s exhibition can be understood as a serious, yet funny narration, invented by a subversive storyteller who likes to invite the viewer to look and think twice. This is the case of the two small pieces referring directly to the exhibition’s title: cutout printed copies of drawings made by the artist’s daughter that got lost between the pages of Walther König’s edition ‘A Conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and John Baldessari’ (2010). Children’s creations absorbed in a high standard art publication.
Jonathan Monk likes to often refer to Alighiero e Boetti as ‘an artist who made conceptual art more human’. Like him Jonathan Monk is looking for the poetic power hidden in everyday objects.
Erich Weiss, curator