Jonathan Monk: Second Hand

Name: Jonathan Monk: Second Hand
Start: 2006-11-29T10:00:00.000+00:00
End: 2007-01-20T17:00:00.000+00:00
Location: 52 Bell Street

London, 29 November 2006 – 20 January 2007

Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition of work by Jonathan Monk previewing Tuesday 28 November.

Jonathan Monk’s work often references or employs the strategies of preceding generations of conceptual artists such as John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Sol Lewitt and Ed Ruscha, and re-contextualises their work with his own personal, often humorous, twist. By connecting the work of these and other artists to his own biography and personal experience, he demystifies the ‘dogma of purity promulgated in the 60s and 70s.’ By appropriating and reworking art from the past, Monk comments on the myths of innovation and originality and gently undermines the idea of artistic authority, not least his own. Although often wry, quizzical and ironic, he never denigrates the achievements of those before him and in fact makes no secret of his emotional, even sentimental affection for the art and artists of this era.

In his exhibition, Monk acknowledges Lewitt, whose exhibition is on at 29 Bell St. in Incomplete Open Paperclips (enlarged) I-V, 2006, a ‘genetic link’ to Lewitt’s Incomplete Open Cube sculptures from 1974. Lewitt’s series investigated the cube, the most basic of geometric form, systematically arranging and subtracting the cube’s elements. Monk’s new sculpture series, based on his manipulations of paperclips, playfully highlights the exhaustive end-game logic of Lewitt’s original works.