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28/11/2006

Sol LeWitt / Jonathan Monk

Lisson Gallery, London

Sol Lewitt
Wall Drawings 1973

Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce new exhibitions of work by Sol Lewitt. The historical achievement of Sol Lewitt over his long and distinguished career is legendary. He was pivotal in the creation of the new radical aesthetic of the 1960s and controversially had no interest in inherent narrative or descriptive imagery. Like no other artist of his generation he maintained the importance of the concept or idea and, apart from his original works on paper, the work is executed by others to clear and strict instructions.

For this Lewitt exhibition, the 'other' is Jonathan Monk, who assumes the roles of both curator and technician by making the Lewitt wall drawings first shown at Lisson Gallery in 1973, which, incidentally, were made by both Lewitt and the gallery's owner, Nicholas Logsdail At 29 Bell Street, Sol Lewitt will be exhibiting a selection of his early wall drawings, which were originally shown at Lisson Gallery in 1973, as well as one new work. In contrast to the bold, graphic and highly coloured work of his last show at Lisson Gallery, these early works are made up of straight black crayon lines made by crayon that simply delineate space on the wall.

Sol Lewitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1928 and lives and works in Chester, Connecticut. After studying Fine Art at Syracuse University, he worked as a graphic designer for I.M. Pei's architecture office in New York. He has exhibited internationally and his works hang in the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, MoMA NY, and DIA, Beacon.

Lisson Gallery
29 Bell Street - London
Free admission

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Jonathan Monk
Second Hand

Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce new exhibitions of work by Jonathan Monk Jonathan Monk's work often references or employs the strategies of preceding generations of conceptual artists such as John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Sol Lewitt and Ed Ruschca, and re-contextualises their work with his own personal, often humorous, twist. By connecting the work of these and other artists to his own biography and personal experience, he demystifies the 'dogma of purity promulgated in the 60s and 70s.' By appropriating and reworking art from the past, Monk comments on the myths of innovation and originality and gently undermines the idea of artistic authority, not least his own. Although often wry, quizzical and ironic, he never denigrates the achievements of those before him and in fact makes no secret of his emotional, even sentimental affection for the art and artists of this era. In his exhibition, Monk acknowledges Lewitt in Incomplete Open Paperclips (enlarged) I-V, 2006, a 'genetic link' to Lewitt's Incomplete Open Cube sculptures from 1974. Lewitt's series investigated the cube, the most basic of geometric form, systematically arranging and subtracting the cube's elements. Monk's new sculpture series, based on his manipulations of paperclips, playfully highlights the exhaustive end-game logic of Lewitts original works. What is Seen is Described, What is Described is Seen (Rothko) I & II, 2006 examine two descriptive languages - the visual and the linguistic. Monk sent postcards of paintings by Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko to the artists Art & Language, asking them to provide a rational and uninflected description of the images. These straightforward descriptions were then given to a commercial sign painter in order to turn the text back into image. In keeping with his self-referential constructs, Monk uses his own body as a unit of measurement in Nine Measurements (Blue), 2005. In this work the circumference of aluminium circles represents the measurements taken by a tailor in order to make a shirt. Jonathan used his own body as the template for the work, which forms an abstract kind of self-portrait. Another version of the work exists in white, making reference to white collar and blue collar labour. Jonathan Monk was born in Leicester, England in 1969 and lives and works in Berlin. His survey exhibition 'Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow etc' is currently at the Kunsthalle Nuremberg until 5th November and then will continue to its forth venue at the Haus am Waldsee, Berlin in December. Monk will have two solo exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2007.

Image: Jonathan Monk, Incomplete Open Paperclip III, 2006 weld steel pipe construction

Lisson Gallery
Location: 52 - 54 Bell Street London

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