{"id":80518,"date":"2025-10-15T18:03:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T18:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/80518\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T18:03:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T18:03:10","slug":"william-monks-new-paintings-at-frieze-london-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/80518\/","title":{"rendered":"William Monk\u2019s New Paintings at Frieze London 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen I arrived at William Monk<\/a>\u2019s cavernous Brooklyn studio last month, the British painter was putting the finishing touches on a series of paintings soon to be crated up and shipped for Pace<\/a>\u2019s solo presentation of his work at Frieze London<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tFormerly the studio of painter Dana Schutz, the space feels like a cross between a warehouse and a chapel. Monk\u2019s large-scale paintings hung on each wall, which stretched two stories to the ceiling, like a psychedelic Stations of the Cross. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019d been with these paintings for a year,\u201d Monk said, standing before a half-finished canvas. \u201cAnd this morning there were just these tiny gaps of raw canvas, little white dots. I had to kill them.\u201d He laughed at his own choice of words. \u201cIf your eye stops there because of something I didn\u2019t intend, that\u2019s bad. You kill it. The eye should move where you want it to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Portrait<\/p>\n

\n\tThat instinct\u2014to control what\u2019s seen and what\u2019s left hovering\u2014has always defined Monk\u2019s paintings. His new body of work, now on view at Frieze, began during a residency at the Neuendorf House in Mallorca, a 1970s modernist compound designed by John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin. Alone for a month, Monk found himself caught in a kind of luxurious purgatory.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was like Waiting for Godot with one character,\u201d he said. \u201cTime stood still.\u201d Out the back of the house was a patchy cactus garden. \u201cI photographed one cactus bush and collaged it over and over again until it became this all-over field, like a Jackson Pollock pattern,\u201d he said. Those cacti now populate his new paintings\u2014vivid, obsessive forms, alternately serene and foreboding.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe works extend the mythology of his 2023 Ferryman<\/a> series, in which he reimagined the figure of death through the lens of his own memories. As a child, he watched the Beatles film Yellow Submarine on repeat; its surreal colors and floating architecture became part of his internal landscape.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBefore my real memories started, that film was already there,\u201d he said. \u201cSo when I imagined death, I thought of that world\u2014the way it makes the unknown seem almost playful.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the new paintings, the ferryman evolves into a sentinel: a solitary figure stationed on an undefined Mediterranean island, surrounded by cactus, water, and rock. \u201cHe\u2019s waiting,\u201d Monk said. \u201cLiving small, contained, and waiting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMonk, who moved from London to New York a decade ago, has built a career on slow, methodical vision. His brushwork\u2014dense, rhythmic, almost musical\u2014recalls both Seurat\u2019s pointillism and the rolling textures of late Bonnard.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy surfaces are always active,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s about rhythm\u2014changing steps.\u201d The solo booth at Frieze is, in a way, a homecoming for an artist who made his bones across the Atlantic.<\/p>\n

\n\tMarc Glimcher<\/a>, Pace\u2019s CEO, told ARTnews that he sees Monk as \u201ca mix of Kubrick, the Beatles, Seurat, and Bonnard\u2014the bastard child of those four.\u201d When he first visited Monk\u2019s studio, Glimcher said, he was struck by the combination of professorial awkwardness and absolute virtuosity.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEach painting nearly kills him,\u201d Glimcher said. \u201cYou look at them and think, how did he survive that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tWilliam Monk, House of Nowhere III (2024-2025) \u00a9 William Monk, courtesy Pace Gallery<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Pace, Monk\u2019s show at Frieze London marks more than just the debut of new work; it\u2019s a quiet manifesto about how the gallery believes primary-market art should be valued.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe had a rule,\u201d Marc Glimcher said. \u201cTen percent every two years. That was how it used to be done. Prices rose slowly, by percentage\u2014not by auction results.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tGlimcher said he sees Monk as a case study in resisting the boom-and-bust logic that has gripped much of the market and led some artists to ruin. \u201cWill makes very few paintings. We escalate the prices gently. He hasn\u2019t even entered the auction cycle yet. We place the works with people who love them, not who flip them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMonk is careful when talk turns to value. \u201cMy paintings have gone up, sure,\u201d he said, \u201cbut New York finds a way to take it all back.\u201d He smiled, half self-deprecating, half sincere. \u201cWhen I was younger, my work was worth nothing, and I felt rich. Now it\u2019s worth something, and I feel broke.\u201d Still, he\u2019s grateful for Pace\u2019s deliberate pace. \u201cIt keeps me out of the noise,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Glimcher, that patience is the point. \u201cWe\u2019re back to the real thing,\u201d he told me on the balcony outside his office. \u201cEnough of artists who skyrocket and flame out. Monk\u2019s the opposite: slow, steady, serious. After the last two years, people\u2019s attention has reset. They\u2019re ready for nuance again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn that sense, Monk\u2019s return to London\u2014his first show there since 2019\u2014feels like a homecoming in more ways than one. The Sentinel paintings, with their glowing cacti and long shadows, are meditations on solitude and endurance but also on the act of seeing itself: what the eye notices, what it misses, what it kills. In the quiet of his studio, surrounded by his guitars and the faint hum of Yellow Submarine, Monk seems to have found a rhythm that resists the speed of everything around him.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI just want the work to last,\u201d he said, looking at a canvas propped against the wall. \u201cIf I can keep it alive\u2014if it can keep me alive a bit longer too\u2014that\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I arrived at William Monk\u2019s cavernous Brooklyn studio last month, the British painter was putting the finishing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[62016,58670,111,139,69,15148,145,62017],"class_list":["post-80518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-frieze-london","tag-marc-glimcher","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pace","tag-technology","tag-william-monk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}