new work, Anton Kern Gallery. Nov 5 - Dec 23
Maurizio :You mentioned you have rules in the studio.
Matthew: No use of photography, no projections, no mannequins, no live models, no body casts, no ready-mades, no fabricators and no source material.
I am pretty dogmatic about this. When I stared with figurative work in 1995 it was so hard to concentrate I had to make sure I had no short cuts out of it. It seemed like an ‘anything goes’ time in art and I felt that I had effectively dropped out. Charcoal drawing? How uncool is that? I just wanted see something that only I could make, and I thought I could find it somewhere in the face and in the body. If you fix the rules and the subject matter, you can really concentrate on the development of style, and by style I don’t mean fashion, I mean it like Barthes when he called style that “lonely and vertical dimension of thought, the product of a thrust and not an intention.” The loneliness could have been too much but I was in a kind of gang with two other artists, Tom Houseago and Micheal Kirkham.
We called ourselves “the crows,” and we really stuck to this dogma and supported each other in our new figurative adventure. Otherwise I think it would have been impossible.
(pulled from an interview with Matthew Monahan and Maurizio Cattelan..)
1972 Born in Eureka Lives and works in Los Angeles
Matthew Monahan’s work presents a futuristic archaeology. Drawing from a wide range of influences, from Modernist art to ancient totems, Monahan’s ‘artefacts’ are both familiar and strange.
Filtering historical mythologies through his own personal system of reference, altered further through the experience of making, Monahan’s work alludes to a contemporary spirituality, where beauty and brutality coalesce as virtual monuments.
(text taken from here.)
Matthew Monahan
new work, Anton Kern Gallery. Nov 5 - Dec 23
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