"The Follower and other works that follow
on from The Follower"
Vernissage: January 10th, 2009 – 7 pm
Last year in November Andreas Torneberg, an artist from Wilhelmsburg, sent
his greetings to the WCW-Gallery. Regarding Wilhelmsburg he wrote: „Welcome!
I live here for four years as an artist. It is a place where the sheep graze
next to the supermarket (...).“
Only at the first glance this description appears as a romantic view on a
rough district of the city of Hamburg, where one can still encounter
agrarian influences. A closer look reveals a much more ambiguous nature of
the sentence. Do the sheep cross the river Elbe in a lorry or will they come
by bike, train respectively by car?
The work of the artist Jonathan Monk, born 1969 in England, now living in
Berlin is about following, imitation and repeating. His strategies of
appropriation question the category of the original in art. Trickily his
works refer on art pieces by other artists, he replicates them and
reoccupies them with a new interpretation. His artistic work focuses on
concept and minimal art from the 1960s and 70s – but also preceding
avant-garde artists are in the game.
The dogmatic, rigid and sometimes anaemic regime of this art creates a
suitable matrix for Jonathan Monk’s humorous and at the same time complex
interventions through links to his personal context and issues of everyday
life.
Monk playfully irritates the concept of monolithic authorship that has
remained popular until today.
For instance, instructions for building up his exhibitions are often vague.
He accepts the fact that the result differs from his original ideas. Monk is
interested in mistakes, voids and gaps, which are a recurrent element in his
works.
It seems like he is searching for gaps in order to suggest invisible
possibilities within these, without attempting to make the possibilities
clear and fixed.
Exhibition: January 15th, 2009 – February 14th, 2009 |
