Jonathan Monk at Multiple Locations, Milan

Multiple Locations shows a selection of Jonathan Monk’s editions that have been created within the last years. Editions are artworks that exist more than once and, after leaving the studio, end up in a wide variety of places. They are made to reach as many, different people as possible, and therefore not the classic exhibition space was chosen for this project, but places alongside Via Nicola Antonio Porpora, Milano, that, except for the neighborhood to some art galleries, archives and artists studio, do not seek much contact with contemporary art.
After a first chapter in Vienna, this exhibition project will now continue in the heart of Milano in more than twenty shops, hotels and bars. All of them are dedicated to different activities: from the traditional, local hardware shop where one can buy all kind of tools, screws and nails to a fancy cocktail bar, from a Chinese bar situated in the same building where Lucio Fontana used to live to a flower kiosk. Jonathan Monk’s editions will be sharing walls and shelves with fruits, bicycles, rugs and wedding dresses. The selection of the editions for each site is based on assonance and thematic references.
The dialogue between the artworks and the specific spaces will create new connections, reflections on contemporary art in relation to the everyday and on the creative process behind Monk’s conceptual artistic practice.
Like few other artists, Jonathan Monk takes on the content and form of art history and contemporary colleagues. Not without recognition, he makes their works his own material. There are small but precise shifts, details in the production process, the format, in the titles and the materiality, which are set very playfully, yet not without seriousness, by Monk, in order to question authorship, originality and uniqueness.
The complex set of references to artists like Alighiero Boetti, Franz West or Ed Ruscha in Monk`s editions will meet the everyday of the inhabitants and shopkeepers of Via Nicola Antonio Porpora, who might have more in common than it seems at first glance.

The editions can be visited during the opening hours of each store. Their owners and all the publishers of the editions by Jonathan Monk deserve our special, very great thanks.

at Multiple Locations, Milan
until May 13, 2023