Moore and Monk

There are two types of reference in Jonathan Monk’s work: personal experiences or fellow artists’ work. The starting point for the various works that comprise the series titled Henry Moore Section Tables was a story the artist told his daughter Hana a few years ago.

In 1988, 19-year-old Monk applied to study at Chelsea College of Art in London. From Leicester, where he had completed a one-year foundation course at the Leicester Polytechnic art school, he brought large-format works with him in a van for presentation in London. When he found out that the selection interview would happen in a tutor’s room on the fourth floor, he installed his wooden sculptures and large paintings in the courtyard. He leaned them against the base of a nearby bronze sculpture, laid works on top of it, or placed them flat on the ground in front of it. Thus, it was from the fourth-floor window that his submitted portfolio was examined.

The sculpture in the courtyard was, in fact, the bronze sculpture Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 1 by British artist Henry Moore from 1959. It had been acquired by the newly founded Chelsea College of Art’s collection in 1964 and installed in the courtyard of the institution on a rotatable pedestal as a kind of didactic object of study. At first glance, one might think it involves two figures—one appears more feminine and the other more masculine. However, the two-part bronze sculpture is the first example in the oeuvre of Moore, where he separated a figure by cutting it into two elements.

Years later, Monk has re-enacted and reinterpreted Moore’s strategy of dissection. The artist had numerous photographs of Moore’s sculpture taken, subsequently integrating them into a three-dimensional computer file of the artwork. This digital object was divided into ten different individual pieces by nine near-horizontal, digital “cuts”. A CNC milling machine then produced the original-sized positive moulds from rigid foam as templates for the bronze castings. These positives are used to create plaster negatives needed for the lost wax process in bronze casting. This is how ten ribbon-like, abstract-organic forms were created. They were patinated on the inside and outside and can be viewed from the outside and inside. The narrow ridges between the inside and the outside were kept as cut edges, showing the bronze’s shimmering yellow-metallic colour.

Monk made ten large, so-called Henry Moore Section Tables from the remaining rigid foam blocks, which are exact matches of the cast bronzes regarding their surface, shape, and size. They have been painted with different colours; their hues depend on the patina of the bronzes. By blowing up detailed images of the bronze surface digitally and reducing their resolution, only one single abstract pixel colour remains and represents the colour of the entire image. This last pixel functions as a template for the colour tint of the tables.

The project also includes a realistically painted portrait on canvas by Monk (Portrait of Henry Moore in Athens 1951). Cast in bronze, it now hangs on the wall as a black “bronze painting” so that one can still make out the brushstrokes’ impasto relief, but not the face of Moore.

While each table has a massive volume, the bronze casts simultaneously reveal both the inner and outer forms. Moore once said that it is impossible to understand a sculpture’s exterior without knowing its interior. Viewers can mentally rotate such a bronze object by Monk and associate it with the voluminosity of the corresponding table. The bronze is a replica of the table, which refers to a digital replica of the sculpture by Moore.

For Monk, the personal relationship to works of Concept Art and Minimal Art is just as important as the reinterpretation of their classical positions. Monk has engaged with artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Serra, Bas Jan Ader, Alighiero Betti, or John Baldessari. He appropriates their frequently austere, objectivistic works in a subjective and personal way, often with a good dose of British humour. His work is a dialectical examination of art from the sixties and seventies and a subjective reinterpretation or transformation into 21st-century art.

— Hans Dieter Huber

Translation Katerine Niedinger