KEEGAN MONAGHAN - jamesfuentes.com · Keegan Monaghan ’s large painting Clouds (all works 2020) depicts a mass of people rendered with thick daubs of color that coalesce as bodies

1JAMES FUENTES

KEEGAN MONAGHAN

2JAMES FUENTES KEEGAN MONAGHAN

KEEGAN MONAGHANThreads

JAMES FUENTESAugust 3–September 27, 2020

Keegan Monaghan’s large painting Clouds (all works 2020) depicts a mass of people rendered with thick daubs of color that coalesce as bodies and shadows only from a distance. Seurat’s pointillism is a clear source of inspiration here; Impressionist painting seems to inform Monaghan’s brushwork as well as his approach to light and shape. The work, like many of the artist’s paintings, vacillates be-tween impressionistic abstraction and intimate representation. Monaghan started Clouds and the other paintings in his ex-hibition “Threads” (2020) in October of last year, before a global pandemic and uprisings in support of Black lives reshaped our understanding of mass gatherings and collectivity in general. The crowd depicted in this work holds a variety of associations: it might be a protest or rally, a concert or festival, an abstract field of color. Monaghan describes the vantage point Clouds as “panoptic,” an om-niscient view from above that subtly evokes surveillance. Peas, a companion painting of sorts, echoes the composition of Clouds: a cluster of rounded forms gathering together, cast in natural light and viewed from above. Here, however, the forms are not bodies but peas in a blue bowl. Considering these two paintings together reveals Monaghan’s interest in moving between micro and macro scales. Peas—with its zoomed-in, close-cropped view—also draws out a connection to photography in the artist’s textural, paint-erly works. Clouds deploys the widest lens while Peas and other works like Button and Threads zoom in on minute details, fragments from the same universe. Button and Threads, in particular, emerge from Monaghan’s desire to paint the body without depicting it—to make works that are bodily but not quite representational. For him, figuration can close down interpretive possibilities: all bodies are specific, and all people relate to the world through our bodies in specific ways. Honing in on a certain detail—the button on a shirt, the interwoven threads that make the shirt—is a way of approaching the body that’s precise yet anonymous. Button depicts the titular object, a translucent red but-ton that takes up most of the canvas. An X of painted green threads in the center of the work fastens the button to gridded cloth—plaid, perhaps—in shades of rich yellow, magenta, green, and blue. Threads, the painting that gives his most recent show its title, hews closer to abstraction: it o!ers an intensely magnified view of

Clouds, 2019–2020Oil on canvas72 " 120 inches74 " 121 #⁄$ inches (framed)

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same: the viewer looks out through blinds at another person, who is looking through blinds out their own window. With its sense of quiet longing and its uncanny movement be-tween in- and outside, Blinds feels particularly resonant right now, amid a pandemic that has drastically changed our relationship to proximity. Monaghan notes, “These paintings also break down as you approach them. Up close, they almost fall apart into total ab-straction and the focus becomes very soft and almost iridescent, but far away the edges appear much more defined and immediate. I see this also as a kind of metaphor for how it can feel to look at things in the world and for looking inward as well, which is something I’m doing a lot of right now.” As the world around us transforms, Monaghan’s paintings create a necessary space for reflection, for closely observing the little things we might otherwise have over-looked.

—Dana Kopel

blue threads woven to form a grid across the canvas. The brush-work here is looser, more spontaneous, and the painting balances the banality of its subject with a sense of precarious uncertainty. That uncertainty reveals an emotional undercurrent woven through all of these paintings. Whereas Monaghan’s previous show at James Fuentes, “Incoming” (2018), was characterized above all by a mood of frantic anxiety, the new works included in “Threads” hold a number of conflicting feelings at once: loneliness but also intimacy, apprehension but also a slow, deliberate sense of care. To focus so closely on minute details—a bowl of peas, a single button—suggests a careful attention to the things around us that are easily overlooked. Monaghan’s process is itself slow and delib-erate: each painting is preceded by a series of quick, rough sketches that help him determine composition and framing, but the paintings themselves are the result of careful additions and adjustments. “I see the paintings as a record of mistakes or indecisions,” Monaghan reflects, and part of their emotional register derives from these lay-ered reworkings. Two other recent works, Wall and Blinds, extend Monaghan’s explorations of painting’s capacity for emotional complexity while o!ering a reflection on the act of looking. Wall comprises curving orange-and-black and green forms layered atop a field of gray poly-gons, all rendered in the artist’s thick, impressionistic brushwork. The work’s sensitivity to shape and color, to the emotional capacity of banal imagery, evokes a more subdued version of the bright, exu-berant abstract paintings of one of Monaghan’s influences, Elizabeth Murray. Yet like the work of Jack Whitten, another influence, Wall features a recognizable image gradually emerging from abstraction: the gray polygons are bricks, and the colorful forms atop this titular wall are fragments of gra%ti. That abstract orange-and-black form occupying much of the work’s right side reveals itself as part of a decorative bubble letter, set o! by painted shadows. Wall is a paint-ing of a painting, an artwork aware of its own illusionistic status. Similarly, Blinds depicts a process of looking to suggest a lens through which to view the artist’s oeuvre. Deploying a more direct first-person perspective, much of the painting both is and is con-cealed by three enormous slat blinds rendered in swirls of forest green. Between these slats, we see fragments of another window framed by pink stonework; that window glows yellow behind its own horizontal bands of blinds, with the shadow of a body subtly visible. As the artist points out, the foreground and background are the

KEEGAN MONAGHAN

KEEGAN MONAGHAN 4JAMES FUENTES

Clouds, 2019–2020Oil on canvas72 " 120 inches, 74 " 121 #⁄$ inches (framed)


Detail: Clouds, 2019–2020Oil on canvas72 " 120 inches, 74 " 121 #⁄$ inches (framed)

Detail: Clouds, 2019–2020Oil on canvas72 " 120 inches, 74 " 121 #⁄$ inches (framed)


Peas, 2019–2020Oil on Canvas60 #⁄$ " 72 inches, 62 " 73 #⁄$ inches framed


Detail: Peas, 2019–2020Oil on Canvas60 #⁄$ " 72 inches, 62 " 73 #⁄$ inches

Detail: Peas, 2019–2020Oil on Canvas60 #⁄$ " 72 inches, 62 " 73 #⁄$ inches


Button, 2019–2020Oil on canvas60 " 72 inches, 62 " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)


Detail: Button, 2019–2020Oil on canvas60 " 72 inches, 62 " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)

Detail: Button, 2019–2020Oil on canvas60 " 72 inches, 62 " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)


Threads, 2020oil on canvas60 " 72 inches, 61 &⁄$ " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)


Threads, 2020oil on canvas60 " 72 inches, 61 &⁄$ " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)

Detail: Threads, 2020oil on canvas60 " 72 inches, 61 &⁄$ " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)


Detail: Threads, 2020oil on canvas60 " 72 inches, 61 &⁄$ " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)


Detail: Wall , 2019–2020Oil on canvas60 #⁄$ " 72 inches, 62 " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)


Wall , 2019–2020Oil on canvas60 #⁄$ " 72 inches, 62 " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)

Detail: Wall , 2019–2020Oil on canvas60 #⁄$ " 72 inches, 62 " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)


Blinds, 2019–2020Oil on canvas60 " 72 inches 61 &⁄$ " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)


Blinds, 2019–2020Oil on canvas60 " 72 inches 61 &⁄$ " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)


Detail: Blinds, 2019–2020Oil on canvas60 " 72 inches 61 &⁄$ " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)

Detail: Blinds, 2019–2020Oil on canvas60 " 72 inches 61 &⁄$ " 73 #⁄$ inches (framed)


Threads at JAMES FUENTES






Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY With their tactile, heavily worked surfaces, glowing light sources, and emphasis on subjective points of view, Keegan Monaghan’s paintings channel aspects of Impressionist painting, but they are very much of today’s image-centric world. Monaghan employs visual tricks to make small items appear disproportionately large, skewing our perspective. The enormously clunky telephone in Incoming, for example, appears within a tightly cropped space, dwarfing the chair behind it. Other paintings play with a sense of inclusion and exclusion, positioning the viewer as a voyeur peering on to a scene through a peephole or fence. It is not always clear in Monaghan’s work whether the viewer is looking out or looking in, excluded or implicated.

The Master and Form, 2018Brendan Fernandes

Incoming , 2016–2017Oil on canvasRed oak frame: 60 #⁄$ " 72 inches62 " 73 '⁄$ inches (framed)


Blue Door , 2019Oil on canvas78 1/8 " 60 1/8 inches

Incoming , 2016–2017Oil on canvasRed oak frame: 60 3/8 " 72 inches62 " 73 7/8 inches (framed)

Outside , 2019Oil on canvas55 " 48 inches (139.70 " 121.92 cm)

Stick, 2019Simone Leigh


Blue Door , 2019Oil on canvas78 1/8 " 60 1/8 inchesBlue Door is part of the Whitney Museum permanent collection.


Incoming , 2016–2017Oil on canvasRed oak frame: 60 3/8 " 72 inches, 62 " 73 7/8 inches (framed)Incoming is part of the Whitney Museum permanent collection; gift from Ninah Lynne in honor of Michael Lynne.


Outside , 2019Oil on canvas55 " 48 inches (139.70 " 121.92 cm)


KEEGAN MONAGHANIncoming

JAMES FUENTESJanuary 24–February 25, 2018

There are two equally powerful forces running perpendicular to each other in Keegan Monaghan’s paintings. One is image, the other is material. On the one hand, we are confronted with thoughtfully cropped narrative images in the form of mostly large-scale oil paintings, each from a provocative P.O.V. perspective. While the influence of cine-matography is clear, a camera is the wrong medium for this work. As material objects, these paintings demand that you see them in person, so that you can take in the whole picture from afar, and then move up close and fall into the abyss of texture. The interaction of physical material process and cerebral cartoon image is what gives the work its visual and emotional depth. With a bizarre oil paint application, Monaghan obsessively builds choppy layers of saturat-ed colors. Thick and dry brushstrokes crisscross in a psychedelic reverberation. In opposition to the highly orchestrated narrative images, zooming into the paint reveals an alternate, material story that hits you on a visceral level. What drives someone to bury paint under paint under paint under paint on the same surface for a year? There is a morbid and mysterious ritual taking place here. Why? Zoom out again. The singular images freeze time in deceptively ordinary moments: a vintage red telephone sits in a dark room with an ‘incoming’ signal emanating light; a glass door distorts a voyeuristic view of a figure showering; city tra%c is pictured from the cage-like vantage point of a basement window; a meaty hand points a camcorder toward a crowd of protesters. In “The Paper”, a newspaper and co!ee cup are dressed in harsh morning light, pro-jecting the shadow of what seems like a lovely window view onto an ambiguous yet ominous front page. But ‘banality’ is a misleading term when bodies exist in such disparate conditions. When whole communities lack access to clean running water, can we call showering ‘mundane’? Rather than inter-pret Monaghan’s slice-of-life scenes as a projection of universality, it’s more helpful to see these timely images as honest reflections of his specific circumstances. In “The Dream”, we peer into a ‘quint-essential boy’s room’, complete with posters of cars and rock stars, at what looks like a ‘quintessential boy’ dreaming in bed. Floating above him, a bright dream bubble overlays the room with a cinemat-ic action still. Inside the bubble, a huge meteor blazes toward a lush

landscape, foreshadowing a tropical apocalypse. In the foreground a pasty man in a Hawaiian-print shirt helplessly looks out at the loom-ing disaster, but he is far enough removed as to avoid direct danger. Sincere despair is experienced from the safety of a comfortable bedroom. Monaghan’s only small painting, “The World”, is paradoxically the most macro scene. It portrays planet Earth as a fuzzy blue and brown ball hovering behind the purple clouds of some other world. Though the image asks you to zoom out, the paint beckons you back in. As you move closer, planet Earth crumbles into dabs of tactile color. Just when you think you’ve figured out the metaphor, you are left suspended in the chaos of goopy, sticky pigment suspended in oil. The considered humanity of this work lies in the constant coming together and falling apart of material and idea. Consciousness is far too layered to be just one thing.

—Katya Tepper


Incoming at JAMES FUENTES


The Screen , 2016–2017 Oil on canvasRed oak frame: 48 (⁄$ " 55 inches


The Paper , 2016–2017 Oil on canvasRed oak frame: 65 (⁄) " 79 (⁄) inches, 67 " 81 inches (framed)


Frosted Glass , 2016–2017 Oil on canvasRed oak frame: 60 (⁄) " 72 inches, 62 " 73 #⁄) (framed)


Basement View, 2016–2017 Oil on canvasRed oak frame: 48 (⁄) " 61 inches, 50 " 62 #⁄)inches (framed)


The Dream, 2016–2017Oil on canvasRed oak frame: 61 (⁄) " 67 (⁄$ inches 63 " 68 inches (framed)


The Paper (still life) , 2017Oil on canvasRed oak frame: 14 " 17 inches 15 (⁄* " 18 (⁄* inches (framed)


The Phone , 2017Ceramic12 (⁄* " 9 (⁄* " 5 inches


Incoming at JAMES FUENTES


KEEGAN MONAGHANYou Decide to Take a Walk

On Stellar RaysJuly 7—August 12, 2016

The world is ridiculous, compromised and impossible. Which is not to say a bad subject, ready to be extruded through camp pathos, folk poetry and gestalt comedy. That extrusion, that’s Keegan Monaghan’s world. It’s a sofa’s exegesis in fugitive color. It’s Bonnard painting a toaster. It’s the surprising hilarity of a banal detail once it’s been artic-ulated in paint. It’s small subjects with big feelings. In this world the pictures are pickled, cured, raked and hewn until the lowly scumble accrues into shimmering asphalt. They yield their scenes through curtains of transparent rock. To codify the geological framework, these are time-over-pressure surfaces, the calcification of luminous strata via the duration of repeated passes. Repeated passes of articulation met with the pressure of doubt. Doubt firing re-articulation, spurring on the repainting of the picture again and again with the heartfelt desire to get it right, like a person rehearsing an identity in the mirror. It’s a surface that em-bodies a dramatic metaphor of doubt, but a doubt made so poignant by time and e!ort that it becomes ecstatic doubt. Ecstatic doubt being a way of invoking something like empathy. It’s not for nothing that the view between disparate states is the atomic experience of this particular body of work. Whether it’s looking out of a brain, through a glass plate or into a movie screen, there’s the persistent reminder that if personhood holds together at all, it does so in the moments you realize not what you are, but what you are not, that identity is predicated on yearning and that yearning is a variant of seeing. A time-pressure metaphor if ever there was one. Keegan Monaghan’s world enacts that biggest-hearted form of irony, which was never about the shirking of commitment, but rather always about mutually conflicting commitments: this thing I want most in life, I also know to be ridiculous, compromised and impossi-ble. It’s the paradox of a commitment to desire as well as to doubt, an abundance of commitment and the fluorescent anguish of that abundance. In other words, these paintings will break your heart while making you smile.

—James English Leary


You Decide to Take a Walk at On Stellar Rays


Security, 2016Oil on canvas in artist’s frame49 #⁄) inches " 56 '⁄$ inches


The Sign Post, 2016Oil on canvas with artist’s frame62 by 73 '⁄$ inches


Thriller, 2016Oil on canvas with artist’s frame36 by 45 inches


My Place , 2016Oil on canvas with artist’s frame61 #⁄) by 73 '⁄$ inches


Introspection , 2016Oil on canvas with artist’s frame42 '⁄$ by 43-#⁄) inches


WHAT TO SEE IN NEW YORK ART GALLERIES THIS WEEKKeegan Monaghan, ‘You Decide to Take a Walk’, On Stellar Rays, 1 Rivington Street, Lower East Side, Through Aug. 12by Karen Rosenberg

With their thick crusts of oil paint, suspenseful noirish settings and liber-al borrowings from his hometown heroes the Chicago Imagists, Keegan Monaghan’s paintings initially appear freighted in so many ways. Give them time, though, and they lighten up, revealing nuanced colors and whimsical musings on perception. The best paintings bring Mr. Monaghan’s own generational perspec-tive (he was born in 1986) to bear on the Imagists’ legacy, dropping their rubbery and pugnacious figures into narratives of contemporary surveil-lance and voyeurism. In “My Place,” he takes us inside a plush orange living room with two stereoscopic portholes; it might be a brain or the interior of a virtual reality headset, or a purposeful confusion of those subjects. And in “Introspection,” he conjures an unexpectedly beautiful mo-ment of transparency; painted from the perspective of a seated figure who is looking down at his denim-clad thighs through a sheer green plate on a glass table. The painting’s gristly surface somehow enhances the crystalline effect. Elsewhere (in the nocturnal scene “The Sign Post”), the same rough texture diffuses the red lights of a speeding police car, which cast a faint glow on the shoe of a fleeing person in the lower right corner. Here Mr. Monaghan’s fully loaded brush approaches, but ulti-mately shies away from, some equally heavy subject matter.

Keegan Monaghan’s painting “Introspection,” 2016.Courtesy of the artist and On Stellar Rays


WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2019 IS A DON’T-MISS SPECTACLE OF WIT AND WEIGHTby Barbara Hoffman

How fresh is the art at this year’s Whitney Biennial? “People were still thinking about their work up until the weekend,” says Jane Panetta, who, with co-curator Rujeko Hockley, put together one of the liveliest shows ever. It’s surely the only one with an S&M ballet, whose half-dozen black-clad dancers undulate against ropes and a jungle gym; a room full of clocks; a series of water-filled dioramas; and what looks like a kimono pinned with anti-de Blasio buttons. Politics, identity, the fragility of both the human body and the Earth itself — everything is on the table here, and on the walls, and occasion-ally dangling from the ceiling. But what makes this show a rare pleasure is how even the weightiest is-sues are tackled in novel and often witty ways. Maybe it’s no coincidence that, of the 75 artists represented here, three-quarters of them are under 40 — and nearly a third of them live and work in the brassy borough of Brooklyn. Nicole Eisenman, whose “Procession” fills the Whitney’s sixth-floor terrace, is one of them. A dogged parade of the oppressed, it’s composed of several sculptures fashioned from all kinds of found objects, from rusty tuna cans to trash-can lids. The biggest one, a hulking Prometheus type, is pulling a trailer whose bumper sticker reads, “How’s my sculpt-ing? Call 1-800-EAT-S - - T.” Don’t miss the figure crouching on all fours, whose behind expels the occasional plume of smoke. Darkly funny, too, are Keegan Monaghan’s “Incoming,” its giant, glow-ing push-button phone as thickly painted as a shag carpet; Calvin Marcus’ bright, pop-arty visions of Los Angeles; and Brian Belott’s installations that involve, respectively, one box fan and several working freezers. Past biennials usually gave us just one work by each artist. This year, we get several, which gives us a better sense of what their creators care about, and where they’re from: Eddie Arroyo’s Hopper-esque landscapes of Miami’s slowly disappearing Little Haiti; Daniel Lind-Ramos’ sculp-tures are crafted from the detritus — palm fronds, shoes, FEMA tarps — left by Hurricane Maria in his native Puerto Rico. If there was ever a biennial you wouldn’t want to miss, it’s this one.

A Whitney Biennial visitor gets a photo of Brooklyn artist Keegan Monaghan’s painting “Incoming.” Photo: Tamara Beckwith/NY Post


Keegan Monaghan (b. 1986, Evanston, IL) holds a BFA from The Cooper Union. His solo exhibitions include “Incoming,” James Fuentes, New York (2018); “You decide to take a walk,” On Stellar Rays, New York (2016); and “Total Recall,” OLD ROOM, New York (2015). Recent group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019); “Eighteen Hundred Showers,” Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2017); “I Pledge Allegiance,” On Stellar Rays, New York (2016); “CCCC: Ceramics Club Cash and Carry,” White Columns, New York (2015); and “Material Stackers,” OLD ROOM, New York (2015). He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Keegan Monaghan has been featured in notable publications including the New York Times, the New York Post, and Artnet.


Born 1986, Chicago, IllinoisLives and Work in Brooklyn, NY

Education

2008 BFA The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY

Solo Exhibitions

2018 Incoming, James Fuentes, New York, NY2016 You decide to take a walk, One Stellar Rays, New York, NY2015 Total Recall, OLD ROOM, New York, NY

Group Exhibitions

2019 Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

2017 Eighteen Hundred Showers, Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY

2016 I Pledge Allegiance, On Stellar Rays, New York, NY 2015 CCCC: Ceramics Club Cash and Carry, White Columns, New York, NY

2014 Teen Glazed, Greenwich House Pottery, New York, NY The Pipe at Gates of Dawn, Jan Kaps Gallery, Cologne,

Germany Ray Smith Studio, New York, NY Parade Ground, New York, NY2013 Wildlife, Karma, Amagansett, NY The Fall of 2012, The Bruce High Quality Foundation

University, New York, NY2009 Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be, La MaMa Experimental

Theatre Club, New York, NY2008 Salad Days 3, Artists Space, New York, NY

Between Us, Koenig & Clinton, Andes, NY

Residencies

2019 Mahler & LeWitt Studios Spoleto, Umbria, Italy

Selected Publications

2017 Phipps, Laura. “Juror’s Comments.” New American Painting, vol. 22, (Feb/March 2017)

2016 Archer, Frankie. “Contemplating ‘I Pledge Allegiance’.” AQNB (March 21, 2016) [online]

Gri%n, Nora. “The Fuzzy Space of Lived Experience.” Artcritical (September 2, 2016) [online]

Rosenberg, Karen. “What to See in New York Galleries This Week” The New York Times (August 4, 2016)

Wolko!, Julia. “Exhibition Reviews” Art in America (November 7, 2016)

2015 Seidel, Stephanie. “The Pipe at The Gates of Dawn.” Frieze (February 19, 2015) [online]

Documents

KEEGAN MONAGHAN - jamesfuentes.com · Keegan Monaghan ’s large painting Clouds (all works 2020) depicts a mass of people rendered with thick daubs of color that coalesce as bodies