Counting In Colour
Jonathan Monk
portfolio of 11 colour lithographs (2010)
November 19, 2010 - January 15, 2011
Here is a quote from the web site of one of Monk’s private galleries that represent his work, Lisson Gallery (London, UK):
“Jonathan Monk's work includes a wide range of media including installations, photography, film, sculpture and performance. His tongue-in-cheek methods often recall procedural approaches typical of 1960's Conceptualism, but without sharing their utopian ideals and notions of artistic genius. Instead, Monk grounds his conceptual approach in more commonplace concerns, that of personal history, his family, even pets, whilst still alluding to the types of systems and processes that artists such as Sol LeWitt employed so rigorously. While much of his work is gently playful and tinged with nostalgia for the late 1960's, it also challenges the idea of purity in modern art, demystifying the creative process and suggesting alternative models for how art and the role of the artist can be interpreted.”
Jonathan Monk was born in 1969 (Leicester) and lives in Berlin. In an interview with David Shrigley, Monk says, "Is it or is it not or can it or can it not be? This is something that has been dealt with within the art world for some time and I guess the unanswerable question keeps us all going...".
In the case of "Counting In Colour" the eleven works can be installed in a particular soccer formation that the artist favours, running counter to the impulse of a linear sequential dispersion of the work.