Matthew Monahan

Anton Kern Gallery, New York

London, Royal Academy of Arts, USA Today: New American Art from The Saatchi Gallery, 2006
London, Saatchi Gallery, The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture, 2011, p. 417, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is warmer and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is attached to a backing board in the top two corners on the reverse. There are artist's pin holes in all four corners. The light handling creases and short tears along the lower half of the left edge are original to the artist's working process.
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Matthew Monahan is an LA based artist who has previously lived in China, Japan and Holland. His varied experiences have instilled within him an investigative desire to closely examine those icons, symbols and images that transcend geographic and temporal limitations. 

From prehistory, the representation of the human figure has pervaded all forms of art in an effort to document and express the human experience. While the image of man was originally used ritualistically, in the modern world artists have returned to the representation of the body in an effort to reconnect and rediscover the human condition and our increasingly fragmented position within the contemporary environment. For Monahan, figurative drawing has always been at the core of his work, the artist turning with unwavering consistency to the two dimensional rendering of the human form throughout his career. On first consideration of the present lot, Monahan's transcription of the human form seems to suggest a da Vinciesque desire to map the body as a an anthropological blueprint, however one quickly deciphers that the meticulous definition of the body is sullied by his use of a sanguine ink that smudges and spoils at the line's edge, besmirching the exposed paper. In this suggestive manner, Monahan elevates the image of the body from the constraints mathematical precision, negating the possibility of the body as solely an ideal, instead presenting the viewer with a totemic entity that connects both to the spiritual image and the biological realities of life.

Matthew Monahan has been the subject of solo shows at LA MOCA and the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, as well as having been included in significant group shows such as at the Carnegie International, Pittsburg, the 9^th Gwangju Biennale, The 4^th Berlin Biennale and Unmonumental at the New Museum in New York. His work is housed in a number of prestigious collections, such as the Tate Gallery, London, SF MOMA, LA MOCA, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Art Institute of Chicago.