We are delighted to announce our second solo show with the American artist Matthew Monahan with an exhibition of ambitious new sculpture, drawing and etching.

Currently residing in Los Angeles, the artist has previously lived in China, Japan and Holland and consequentially the metaphor of travel runs vividly throughout Monahan’s art work, in both his compression of genre, history and its subsequent displacement. There is a feeling that these sculptures have been ‘lived’, and not just made, and they have come about through years of fascination, observation and experience by the artist.

Monahan’s sculpture typically combines charcoal drawing with carved figures (made from expanding foam, photocopies, beeswax) displayed in a museological presentations fashioned from building materials such as plasterboard and glass. In many of the latest works, the artist exploits a sculptural tension and gravity by continuing to explore the presentation of his work on, in, or around the plinth.

These recent works include pieces that are literally ‘in space’, almost floating, trapped between two panes of glass and tightly held in suspension by industrial straps. Other sculptures have been created around a drawing. In one work, a large sweeping charcoal portrait is encased inside a glass vitrine (or rather, a vitrine is built around it), subverting the inherent hierarchy of sculpture over drawing.

In this exhibition Monahan has utilised his debased repertoire of materials to create an incredible, compelling and utterly unique body of work that transcends its own materiality into a remade and recycled spiritual classicism.

Matthew Monahan has been the subject of solo shows at LA MOCA, the Douglas Hyde

Gallery Dublin, and has been included in significant group shows such as The Carnegie

International, Pittsburgh, the 9th Gwangju Biennale, The 4th Berlin Biennale and

Unmonumental at the New Museum in New York. His work is in the collection of the Tate Gallery, SF MOMA, LA MOCA, the Stedelijk Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

For further information or images, please contact Andrew Cannon at andrew@modernart.net