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Lot Essay
'It speaks of long days spent in the studio pulling and pushing materials into new forms and combinations, consumed in traditional sculptural concerns about volume and weightlessness, surface and substance, and giving life to inanimate substance'
(J. Griffin, 'Matthew Monahan', in Frieze, October 2007, unpaged).
Totemic in its monolithic presence, Midnight Mission by Matthew Monahan presents a futuristic archeology of form through distortion. Part object, part artifact, it straddles the polarities of Modernist art and the ancient form of totems. Adopting the presentation technique of Western museums, a glass vitrine houses twisted and tortured forms that writhe into almost abstracted hand-crafted relics, providing a succinct commentary on the modern 'artifact'. Presiding over these precious objects, the plinth is crowned with a God-like figure which revels in its own captivating materiality. Different planes of the beautifully raw, tactile surface crash and collide as the sculpture's form appears to undulate between abstraction and figuration.
Midnight Mission is caught in the tension between brutality and beauty. It exudes an overwhelming sense of calm and tranquility against the dramatic grandeur emitted from the sheet physicality of this monument. The work thus indulges in both the familiar and Freudian notions of the uncanny as the viewer is mesmerised by the simultaneous feelings of both 'heimlich' and 'unheimlich'. As with all Monahan's sculptural works, it 'speaks of long days spent in the studio pulling and pushing materials into new forms and combinations, consumed in traditional sculptural concerns about volume and weightlessness, surface and substance, and giving life to inanimate substance' (J. Griffin, 'Matthew Monahan,' in Frieze, October 2007, unpaged).
(J. Griffin, 'Matthew Monahan', in Frieze, October 2007, unpaged).
Totemic in its monolithic presence, Midnight Mission by Matthew Monahan presents a futuristic archeology of form through distortion. Part object, part artifact, it straddles the polarities of Modernist art and the ancient form of totems. Adopting the presentation technique of Western museums, a glass vitrine houses twisted and tortured forms that writhe into almost abstracted hand-crafted relics, providing a succinct commentary on the modern 'artifact'. Presiding over these precious objects, the plinth is crowned with a God-like figure which revels in its own captivating materiality. Different planes of the beautifully raw, tactile surface crash and collide as the sculpture's form appears to undulate between abstraction and figuration.
Midnight Mission is caught in the tension between brutality and beauty. It exudes an overwhelming sense of calm and tranquility against the dramatic grandeur emitted from the sheet physicality of this monument. The work thus indulges in both the familiar and Freudian notions of the uncanny as the viewer is mesmerised by the simultaneous feelings of both 'heimlich' and 'unheimlich'. As with all Monahan's sculptural works, it 'speaks of long days spent in the studio pulling and pushing materials into new forms and combinations, consumed in traditional sculptural concerns about volume and weightlessness, surface and substance, and giving life to inanimate substance' (J. Griffin, 'Matthew Monahan,' in Frieze, October 2007, unpaged).