"For 'The Deflated Inflated', Jonathan Monk turns his attention to neo-pop artist Jeff Koons. In 1987 – incidentally the same year that Monk began art school in Glasgow – Charles Saatchi first introduced Koons’ work to a British audience, by including ‘Rabbit’ (1986) in the two-part exhibition New York Art Now. The sculpture, a larger than life cast in stainless steel of a toy bunny inflatable balloon, has become an icon of its era and its highly polished surface has fuelled imitations and tributes, such as Mark Leckey’s film ‘Made in ‘Eaven’ (2004).

Starting from a pink vinyl inflatable bunny, Koon’s original source, Monk has created a sequence of stainless steel sculptures, which capture the inflatable in progressive states of deflation. With each stage, the ‘Deflated Sculpture’ (2009) droops slightly, leans against the wall of the exhibition space, folds over and collapses in a formless shape on its own plinth. As Koons raised everyday mundane objects to iconic status, Monk literally deflates this monumentality using a characteristic whimsical twist and a wink to Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures."
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.