Keegan Monaghan

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Parker Gallery is proud to present its first solo exhibition with New York-based artist Keegan Monaghan. The exhibition includes one large oil painting, three smaller oil paintings and a group of eight ceramic sculptures—all made this year.

The three smaller paintings in the exhibition present closely cropped, casual views of unlikely subjects: a partially-filled tumbler resting atop a newspaper, (Glass), a wall socket dangerously stuffed with an adapter and too many cords, (Outlet), and a streetscape reflected in the murky waters of a curbside gutter, (Puddle). The imagery of these paintings feels intimate, if also indifferent. As if to pause and ask, “Is this significant?” The question is rhetorical, as Monaghan demonstrates an innate ability to translate the mundane and precarious into transcendent paintings that capture a certain rapture not dissimilar to that induced by a sublime, impressionistic landscape. Upon close examination, we become lost in a sea of brushstrokes; rich, thick paint lathered in unruly directions and hues that belie the subject at hand.

Blue Car portrays a car idling on the road, its brake lights glowing as noxious green fumes spew from its tailpipe. A destination lies ahead, unknown and out of view. The abstraction of the rear license plate gives us something to ponder as we watch it lurch forward.

A group of eight ceramic sculptures appear to be taking shape before our eyes. Their texture is so hand-wrought, the artist’s fingerprints are preserved in the clay. That these works were created during a period of stay-at-home orders and work-from-home solutions speaks to the urgency of human connection at a granular level. Bowl of Food offers a dish of ambiguous brown pebbles with a silver spoon, a somber reflection on humdrum, domestic eating habits. Meanwhile, Book presents an opportunity for imaginative wandering: open pages reveal a tropical seaside retreat, constructed of tactile ceramic glazes that contradicts the flat photography it aims to depict.

Keegan Monaghan (b. 1986 Evanston, IL) lives and works in New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Threads (2020) and Incoming (2018), James Fuentes, New York, NY and You decide to take a walk, On Stellar Rays, New York, NY (2016). Recent group exhibitons include the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2019), Eighteen Hundred Showers, Simone Subal, New York, NY (2017) and The Pipe at Gates of Dawn, Jan Kaps, Cologne, Germany (2014). His work in included in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.