Jonathan Monk

“JONATHAN MONK is the name of a versatile and feverishly active British artist who is currently showing his work at Index. He creates in most media, fluently but without real seriousness. Ironic and witty, without high pretensions. The elevated must be brought down, the classical and refined must be soiled by everyday life. Exalted is the last thing he wants to be.

Monk enters into a dialogue with the contemporary greats: in a pizza box are tools with which everyone can make their own striped Agnes Martin painting, his large gray canvases brings Gerhard Richter to mind. Clouds and gray skies, but something Richter would never let in: a lonely football on a beach. ‘The agony’ and ‘The ecstasy’ are said to be about an important football match and a goal that turned misery into ecstatic triumph. The kind of pathos Monk can afford.”

Translated quote from DN, 1995-10-20, Daniel Birnbaum. Read full text in Swedish.