Opening days: Friday, 09|09 & Saturday, 10|09, 12-6 pm
KOENIG2 by_robby greif | margaretenstr. 5 | 1040 vienna

Jonathan MONK
Exhibit Model Eight

through Saturday, 08|10|22

Previously exhibited all over Europe since 2016, Jonathan Monk’s (*1969 in Leicester, UK) wallpapers have made it to Vienna. Like Monk’s visual practice, however, they never repeat but are flexible in their composition and shapes, expandable and interchangeable without losing their fundamental assignment. All the exhibitions in which the wallpapers are shown thus avoid the tedium of monotony. After all, the narrative strands they form are part of a naturally growing organism that evolves with each production. In this sense, Exhibit Model Eight is an expansion of comprehensive images of installation views applied to the wall, both functioning as amassed archive material and updated exhibits.

Assembled in KOENIG2 by_robbygreif into a virtual retrospective in progress, Jonathan Monk creates a space of experience that is fundamentally different from the normative communication of exhibitions, requiring the visitor to adjust their perceptual apparatus: Instead of occupying the room within the walls of the gallery, as usual, the artist creates multiple alternate spatial dimensions on its borders. With Monk’s works shifted into these dimensions, subject and object exchange places. And while doors and windows invite us to immersively explore these inaccessible exhibition rooms, a few inconsistencies prevent us from believing that we can enter them: The images’ boundaries are abrupt and the contradictory perspectives of individual pieces of wallpaper fluctuate. This has the effect of suspenseful disorientation, which is composed of a peculiar familiarity and its simultaneous dissolution through the withdrawal of almost all color.

Monk’s enigmatic exhibition concept, however, amounts to a clear result: the reflection of all aspects of perception on the artist himself. The depictions of revived previous exhibitions, therefore, materialize an extensive outline of Monk’s work that defies any traditionally required context: Several periods and work stages are presented simultaneously and overlap without any information on individual installation sections, chronology, or work titles. Consequently, an endless circle of artworks emerges into the documentation of documentation. At the same time, we are completely on our own to form a coherent reality from the material provided and decipher its code. In his usual manner, Jonathan Monk thus succeeds in completely disrupting the outdated conditions of the White Cube.

(Teresa Kamencek, 2022)

Jonathan MONK
LIGHTS OFF, AFTER HOURS, IN THE DARK Lights Off, After Hours, In The Dark

through Saturday, 08|10|22

LIGHTS OFF, AFTER HOURS, IN THE DARK Lights Off, After Hours, In The Dark features a new series of works by Jonathan Monk in which he has photographed the Louise Lawler 2021 exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York. These photographs were taken in one evening after the gallery was closed to the public and relied on long exposures and ambient light emanating from exit signs, skylights, and hallways. The series was edited down to nine images and these were printed as dye sublimation prints directly on aluminium. Each picture was then framed in powder coated steel frames. The nine different RAL colours used were selected by Donald Judd for his metal furniture production in 1984.