WILLIAM MONK

Monk is known for his atmospheric, vibrant compositions that feature mysterious and otherworldly forms. The artist’s semi-abstract paintings are deeply engaged with the rich tradition and history of the medium. He frequently creates works as part of different series, drawing on various sources of inspiration connected to his own experience.

West of Nowhere, focusing holistically on notions of transience and liminality, will spotlight two new bodies of work by the artist: large-scale landscapes that relate to the paintings he presented at Pace’s New York gallery last year and small-scale paintings based on Rorschach inkblot tests. Both these series are underpinned by questions of subjectivity and perception, particularly as they relate to ascriptions of meaning.

Like his other bodies of work, Monk’s new paintings evade easy categorization and interpretation. As the artist has said, ‘Only after the work is complete do I become aware of specific past experiences that helped to inform it— perhaps in the same way that a dream picks up on certain conscious moments and twists them.’

The four landscape paintings that will anchor Monk’s upcoming exhibition with Pace in LA suggest what French anthropologist Marc Augé termed ‘non-place,’ or an anthropological space in which human relationships, histories, and identities are erased. In these works, mountainous landscapes rendered in patchworks of mottled gray, lilac, and ochre hues are partially obscured by groups of centrally situated, vertically oriented pillars that feature washes of color. The paintings in this body of work invite viewers to imagine themselves within the pictorial space while also, paradoxically, denying access to the very landscape depicted—and to any fixed meaning—by way of the pillars.

The six small-scale paintings in the second body of work on view in West of Nowhere directly references inkblots from Hermann Rorschach’s psychological tests, but the abstract, mesmeric shapes in Monk’s works are painted in bright, bold colors. Presenting unusual and psychedelic referents, these paintings reflect the phenomenon of pareidolia, in which the mind seeks to create meaning from indistinct, ambiguous, or nebulous visual stimuli.