William Monk

William Monk’s paints enigmatic and vibrant works, using starkly divisional compositions and often works in extensive series that gradually evolve over time. The canvases carry irregular intensities of detail, line, foreground and background, a sense of repetition breaks down the figuration, creating visual mantras. This rhythm happens throughout his work, surrendering figurative logic to arrive at something stranger and more powerful. Atmospheric and energetic, these paintings invite a more direct physical connection, drawing in the space between our inner and outer realms of experience.

The artist 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.

Monk was awarded the Koninklijke Prijs voor Vrije Schilderkunst (Royal Award for Painting) in 2005 and the Jerwood Contemporary Painters award in 2009. Monk’s work has been exhibited at Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (NL); Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (NL); Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (NL); GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); James Cohan Gallery, New York (US); Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (US); Norwich University, Norwich (UK); PSL, Leeds and Summerfield Gallery, Cheltenham, London (UK). His work can also be found in the collections of the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (NL); AKZO Nobel, Amsterdam (NL); David Roberts Art Foundation, London (UK); Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (NL); ING, Amsterdam (NL), and in many private collections.