Berlin | ArtRegion: Berlin, Charlottenburg

Mehdi Chouakri Mommsenstrasse

Jonathan Monk: Henry Moore Section Tables

12. Juni – 28. August 2021

There are two types of reference in Jonathan Monk’s work: personal experiences or fellow artists’ work. The starting point for the various works that comprise the series titled Henry Moore Section Tables was a story the artist told his daughter Hana a few years ago.

The project also includes a realistically painted portrait on canvas by Monk (Portrait of Henry Moore in Athens 1951). Cast in bronze, it now hangs on the wall as a black “bronze painting” so that one can still make out the brushstrokes’ impasto relief, but not the face of Moore.

For Monk, the personal relationship to works of Concept Art and Minimal Art is just as important as the reinterpretation of their classical positions. Monk has engaged with artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Serra, Bas Jan Ader, Alighiero Betti, or John Baldessari. He appropriates their frequently austere, objectivistic works in a subjective and personal way, often with a good dose of British humour. His work is a dialectical examination of art from the sixties and seventies and a subjective reinterpretation or transformation into 21st-century art.