Matthew Monahan Untitled Self Portrait (2007) Exhibition Lightjet Chromogenic (Type C) Print Archival Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Paper (11" x 14”) Limited Edition on 150 Signed & Numbered by the Artist

About The Artist "I think (at its best) my work is very dense and has a lot of self-negating masochism. It involves decay and fragility — a lot of things that, by their nature, are anti-commodity. It's quite perverse to try to turn this into a successful business model. Objects get a kind of stature, then I sort of trash them or humiliate them. Somehow that annihilation is like a spiritual need for me." - Matthew Monahan, Art in America On the eve of his first solo show at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art, Matthew Monahan can look back upon the past couple years of his career and feel proud. Born in 1972, this young artist's resume already reads like seasoned, mid-career professional. Notable accomplishments include: exhibiting at the 2006 Whitney Biennial; sold-out solo shows in New York & the UK; high-profile exhibits across Europe & Asia; great press from Artforum & The New York Times; permanent collection acquisitions by The Tate, MOMA, and The Rubell Family Collection; and (finally) the purchase of nearly 20 artworks by Charles Saatchi for his sensational eponymous collection. Using his studio as a mine of inspiration, Matthew excavates his own creative output, assembling, reconsidering and recycling ideas, objects and images. Framed as faux-museological displays, Matthew’s sculptures operate as recorded histories, both of his own artistic processes and of cultural lore. Mathew revamps age-old symbolism to highlight their meanings as being both fluctuating and fixed. Through his intervention, traditional motifs are translated to reflect the current zeitgeist; his personal signature is added to their legacy. Matthew lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Anton Kern Gallery (New York), Modern Art (London) and Galerie Fons Welters (Amsterdam). About This Print Untitled (Self Portrait) is a digital scan of harvested elements from several of Matthew's sculptures. Matthew painstakingly posed the elements on top of an Epson Expression 1600 flatbed scanner. The resulting image is a souvenir of Matthew's current sculptural work, custom made for the Phantom Ball. The image is beautifully grotesque, calling to mind the history of self portraiture—Parmigianino's Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror and similar genre benchmarks by Rembrandt, Dürer, and Van Gogh come to mind. The "warts and all" aesthetic embraces the residue of the process. For Matthew, the wax drippings, the string fragments, even the optical irregularities resulting from the unorthodox use of a desktop scanner are important to his practice.