15 September–23 December 2011
BFAS Blondeau Fine Art Services
5 rue de la Muse
1205 Geneva, Switzerland
T +41 (0)22 544 95 95
F +41 (0)22 544 95 99
muse [at] bfasblondeau.com
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“Appropriation is something I have used or worked with in my art since starting art school in 1987. At this time (and still now) I realised that being original was almost impossible, so I tried using what was already available as source material for my own work. By doing this I think I also created something original and certainly something very different to what I was representing. I always think that art is about ideas, and surely the idea of an original and a copy of an original are two very different things.”
—Jonathan Monk, 2009
“I declared a painting ban for myself, I let someone else paint for me.”
—Martin Kippenberger, 1981
BFAS Blondeau Fine Art Services is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Jonathan Monk in Geneva, at its space at 5 rue de la Muse.
Previously, Monk has taken on artists such as John Baldessari, Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, and Lawrence Weiner, as source material for his own artwork. For this exhibition Dear Painter, paint for me one last time, Jonathan Monk follows his attention to the artist Martin Kippenberger and addresses the status of contemporary painting.
In 1981, Martin Kippenberger made his first museum show Lieber Maler, male mir (Dear painter, paint for me) at Berlin’s Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst. He hired a billboard painter called Werner to execute the paintings. Martin Kippenberger proclaimed that this was Werner’s first “indoor” exhibition.
Jonathan Monk commissioned reproductions of 10 paintings by a Chinese painter which will be exhibited in our gallery 30 years after the museum debut of Martin Kippenberger.
By delegating his own painting to others Jonathan Monk demonstrates a multiplication of the duplication that Kippenberger arranged: while the latter had his paintings copied from photographs that he had taken, Monk’s paintings exist as images of a secondary order, preceded by the generation of Kippenberger’s paintings. The series Dear Painter, paint for me one last time consists of a system circulating within itself, by narrating art as art, therefore speaking of itself, without incorporating the concrete self-expression of the artist. Where Kippenberger retains a reference to his own person in the form of the paintings’ subject, in Monk’s case it is merely the action which remains as a trace in his work: this conceptual artistic stance is counterposed by an action as a service and reduces the relationship between original and reproduction to absurdity. [1]
Monk has exhibited extensively since the 1990s and his work is held in public and private collections internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Leon D’Oro (with Douglas Gordon), Fondazione Morra Greco, Napoli, 2009; Jonathan Monk: Rew-Shay Hood Project, Artpace, San Antonio, TX, 2009; The Time Between Spaces at Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2008; Tramway, Glasgow, 2008; Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow etc. at Kunstverein Hannover, Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Leiterin Haus am Waldsee, Berlin from 2006-07; A continuous Project Altered Daily at ICA, London, 2005.
This exhibition is organized in collaboration with Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe.
A newspaper accompanies the exhibition. Press packs and HD illustrations are available on request.
Please contact philippe [at] bfasblondeau.com for any further enquiries.
[1] Christina Irrgang, 2008.
