Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

This Painting Should Be Installed by an Accountant

Image caption
JONATHAN MONK

This Painting Should Be Installed by an Accountant

  • 2011
  • Fine gold leaf and canvas on oil
  • 159 x 109,5 x 2 cm
  • Cat. P_808
  • Acquired in 2016
By:
Yolanda Romero Gómez

This painting Should Be Installed by an Accountant (2011) is one in a series entitled This Painting Should Be Installed by..., in which the author invites a variety of figures — a banker, a millionaire, a prostitute, etc. — to hang his work. The series originated in his 'It's a Circus' exhibition, at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris in 2011, at which Monk presented twenty-three photographs of the actions of a troupe of circus performers who hung twenty-three monochrome paintings on the walls of the gallery, following a very precise choreography established by the artist. In this way, Monk controlled who installed his work and how.

The piece in the Banco de España collection was created in 2011 and reflects the artist's concern with what happens to his productions once they leave the studio. Made using gold leaf — a clear reference to Yves Klein's revolutionary gold monochromes from the 1960s — the work is displayed leant against a wall, all ready to be hung in accordance with the instructions contained in the title. Unlike other pieces of conceptual art, Monk turns the instructions, reproduced on the canvas, into the work itself, while involving its possible owner in the action of completing the meaning of the work, which is achieved when the person named in the instructions (in this case an accountant) executes the order. In this way, the artist is satirising both the absurd hanging instructions that often accompany works of art and the role of the museum curator, who sometimes uses installation to manipulate the artist's intended meaning. Monk's work is rooted in the conceptual artistic practices of the 1960s, which he appropriates and reinterprets, while introducing a peculiar humorous vision behind which lie interesting reflections on the role of the artist in the art world, the economic value of the work and the role of the public.

The painting was presented at Manifesta 11, held in Zurich in 2016, under the title 'What People do for Money', curated by artist Christian Jankowski.

Yolanda Romero Gómez

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Jonathan Monk
Leicester 1969

Jonathan Monk is one of the most outstanding British artists of his generation. He received a BFA from Leicester Polytechnic in 1988 and an MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 1991. Since the 1990s, he has been producing multidisciplinary work, using a wide variety of materials and techniques based on appropriation and semantic and formal play with works by prominent pop, conceptual and minimalist artists from the 1960s and 1970s. In his work, he ironically transfers their utopian and mythical character to banal issues from his own experience or personal environment, satirising some of the concepts attributed to them in traditional notions of art, such as originality, authorship, exhibition spaces and the art market. He uses the written word extensively in his work, either as a component of the pieces or through the titles. He employs it to alter, emphasise or shift the referent to which it alludes towards an ironic or satirical meaning.

His work has enjoyed major international projection and has been shown at events such as the Berlin Biennial (2001), the Venice Biennale (2003, 2009) and the Whitney Museum Biennial (New York, 2003). He has also featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum Kunst Palast (Düsseldorf, Germany, 2003); the Institute of Contemporary Art (London, 2005); Kunstverein Hannover (Hannover, 2006); the Palais de Tokyo and the Musee d'Art Moderne (Paris, 2008); the Malaga Centre for Contemporary Art (2013); the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, 2014); the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma (Rome, 2015); and the Kunsthaus Baselland (Muttenz, Switzerland, 2016), among others. In 2012 he won the Prix du Quartier Des Bains de Genève.

Isabel Tejeda

 
«What People Do For Money. Manifesta 11» (Zürich, 2016). «(UN)COMMON VALUES. Two Corporate Collections of Contemporary Art», National Bank of Belgium (Brussels, 2022).
Vv.Aa. What People Do For Money, Zurich, Stichting Manifesta 11, 2016. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.