William Monk

William Monk makes intricately encrypted landscapes on small and very large oil paintings, woodcut monotypes, collages and watercolors. Fine details, obsessively executed in a manner resembling both pointillist and visionary art, cause scale to shift dramatically: an image of an aerial landscape will flip to resemble minuscule circuitry. Hot, lurid colors evoke thermal imagery, radiography or nuclear fallout, in an uneasy balance between the organic and the harmful. Repetition of a single composition makes simple depictions of clusters of trees or sunsets increasingly ritualistic and hallucinatory.

The curved horizon of Hands (2014) evokes both the surface of the earth at a deep distance and the lens of the human eye, looking up, absorbing light. The green section above the landmass at the bottom of the painting has clearly been padded and smeared with the artist’s hands, grounding the viewer’s eye relative to human scale and lending the work its casually mundane, ambiguous title. The inky upper half of the painting could be infinite outer space or a moment between night and day so brief that the eye does not log it in the memory. Monk’s oeuvre, as Hands shows, is an inquiry into the relationship of a picture to an experience. Artforum’s Robert Jan-Muller writes, of Monk’s recent work: “This preoccupation with minute detail—each speck of color sitting in its own place—gives everything portrayed in Monk’s paintings, whether a telephone pole or a highway’s dotted yellow line, a life of its own.”

William Monk (b. 1977, United Kingdom) won the 2005 Royal Award for Painting during his two years in Amsterdam studying at the residency De Ateliers, resulting in widespread, ongoing institutional recognition in Northern Europe. Recent museum group exhibitions include the Museum Belvédère, Heerenveen, the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, and a solo exhibition at the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden. In 2009 he was a recipient of the Jerwood Painting Prize in the United Kingdom, which resulted in a yearlong national touring exhibition. Monk lives and works in London.