VIENNA.- In his exhibition Limited Company at the Belvedere 21, Jonathan Monk stages an ongoing dialogue between art history, the setting, and personal recollection: a 115-foot printed curtain marks the point of departure for a continually shifting narrative that questions the idea of the classic retrospective and translates it into an exhibition space laid out as an open-ended process.
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Stella Rollig, General Director of the Belvedere: Jonathan Monk ranks among the foremost practitioners of conceptual art in his generation. In his first solo exhibition at a museum in Austria, he brings subtle irony to reflections on originality, authorship, and memory – and interweaves his own exhibition history with recent works in a multifaceted composition in three dimensions that explicitly ties in with its Viennese setting.
Jonathan Monk enjoys international renown as a leading representative of conceptual contemporary art, a practice defined by its critical engagement with creative authorship, institutional structures, and arthistorical narratives. His oeuvre unfolds in a complex interplay between appropriation, repetition, and conceptual displacements. The boundaries between different media, Monk believes, are made to be crossed: his art blends painting, photography, video, sculpture, and installation art with the same ease with which it mixes biographical motifs, art-theoretical perspectives, and subversive humour. In many works, iconic oeuvres and gestural strategies of minimal and conceptual art – like those of On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Louise Lawler, or Franz West – provide the inspiration for Monk’s own works.
The title Limited Company alludes to Jonathan Monk’s meditations on the presence and absence of his works in the exhibition space, while also gesturing toward the interplay between the works on display in the context of the exhibition, where many of them appear in pairs or serial variations. With a view to the widely used corporate legal form (most familiar under the abbreviation Ltd), in which the liability of members is capped to their investment, Monk also explores economic structures that shape the art world: in 2016, he defied the pressure to produce by presenting large-format photographic wallpapers with black-and-white installation views of earlier exhibitions rather than physical works.
Curator Axel Köhne: Gifted with a flair for context, repetition, and appropriation, Jonathan Monk deftly scrutinizes the conventions governing conventional exhibition practices. By transforming the exhibition space into a dynamic ensemble in which past and present interpenetrate, he initiates a multifaceted play with the idea of reproduction and the (personal) retrospective.
In his exhibition, Monk now responds to the Belvedere 21’s distinctive architecture with a new iteration of his iconic Exhibit Model series. The large-format installation Exhibit Model Nine consists of twentytwo printed fabric panels forming a curtain with a total width of 115 feet that runs the length of the gallery. Printed with installation views of past exhibitions in cities including Berlin, Montreal, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen, and Vienna, the curtain unfurls a dense web of visual recollections. Perspectives, places, scales, and points in time are blurred in a sprawling self-contained visual archive that is recorded in photographs in turn and may resurface in future versions of Exhibit Model.
Carefully selected works from diverse series – including Date Paintings, Parrot Paintings, and Separated – moreover underscore the dialogical quality of the presentation and enter into direct, if sometimes subtle, interrelation with the curtain. While the exhibition is on view, some works are rearranged and some are exchanged for others, producing a series of novel constellations and contexts of meaning. In this way, the exhibition does not harden into a static display, instead becoming a versatile system undergoing continual change to reflect Monk’s interest in process, repetition, and temporary propositions.
In cooperation with museum in progress, a series of flag works titled West Wind and created in connection with the exhibition are shown as part of the project raising flags. In these works, Monk plays with the format of the Austrian national flag by picking up on iconographic elements and reinterpreting them in Franz West’s signature palette. One flag appears in the gallery as part of a new work dedicated to West; another is installed in the Belvedere 21’s sculpture garden. Four additional flags bring Monk’s strategy of appropriation into the public sphere: flying over the Stubenbrücke, a bridge in downtown Vienna, they are a humorous yet meticulously targeted intervention that extends the exhibition’s vision beyond the bounds of the museum.
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