Matthew Monahan

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Matthew Monahan (b.1972, Eureka, California) is an artist based in Los Angeles. He is represented by Anton Kern Gallery in New York, and Fons Welters in Amsterdam.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Influences 3 Background 4 Galleries 5 External links

[edit] Biography

Monahan studied at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and the Gerit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, Holland. Using his studio as a mine of inspiration, Matthew Monahan excavates his own creative output, assembling, reconsidering and recycling ideas, objects and images. Framed as faux-museological displays, Monahan’s sculptures operate as recorded histories, both of his own artistic processes and of cultural lore. Monahan revamps age-old symbolism to highlight their meanings as being both fluctuating and fixed. Through his intervention, traditional motifs are translated to reflect the current zeitgeist; his personal signature is added to their legacy.

[edit] Influences

Monahan borrows from a wide range of influences, from ancient artifacts to Constructivist artists such as Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner. Creating mysterious fictions from formalist play, Monahan invents a parallel world where the artist is creator and conjurer of nightmarish fantasy. His works are humble facsimiles, encapsulating a sense of timeless wonder with meagre and bereft gestures.

[edit] Background

Corporeality is central to Monahan’s practice. Distorted to near abstraction, his forms are glamorised and tortured by their material construction: suffocated in lacquer, contorted through folding, pierced by objects and smothered beneath glass. Drawing, for Monahan, becomes a way to further explore the body as a totemic entity: biological, architectural and shamanistic. His studies divert from the purely human, suggesting ancient and alien beings. Coalescing beauty and brutality as makeshift monuments, Monahan presents images of both promise and anguish, edging towards an unsettling spiritualism.

[edit] Galleries

Monahan has shown internationally at galleries, collections, and museums such as:

• Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art - [1]
• The Chinese European Art Center [2] in Xiamen
• Bureau Stedelijk [3] in Amsterdam
• The National Center for Art [4]in St. Petersburg
• The Royal Academy [5] in London
• The Saatchi Gallery [6]
• Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen [7]
• The Stedelijk Museum [8]
• The Fries Museum [9].

In 1999, Monahan participated in both the Liverpool and LA International Biennales.

[edit] External links

• Works at the Anton Kern Gallery
• Review in New York Times
• Saatchi Gallery Showing