Keegan Monaghan

James Fuentes is thrilled to present Threads, Keegan Monaghan’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition’s largest painting, ​Clouds (​all works 2020), depicts a crowd of people rendered with thick daubs of color that coalesce as bodies and shadows only from a distance. Like many of the paintings in this exhibition, the work vacillates between impressionistic abstraction and intimate representation. Monaghan started ​Clouds ​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.

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. The juxtaposition of the two reveals Monaghan’s interest in moving between micro and macro scales.​ Peas,​ with its zoomed-in, close-cropped vantage point, also draws out a connection to photography. ​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.

Threads​, the painting that gives the show its title, hews close to abstraction: it offers an intensely magnified view of blue threads woven to form a grid across the canvas. The brushwork 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 works in “Threads” hold a number of conflicting feelings at once: loneliness but also intimacy, apprehension but also a slow, deliberate sense of care.

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.