Covered Motorbike II, 2018-2019
Covered Motorbike is the largest bronze sculpture the artist has produced to date. Although reminiscent of a monumental reclining bronze or a piece of classical public statuary, Monk’s life-size form is shrouded in secrecy, refusing to reveal its true identity. While the carefully rendered tarpaulin appears real and pliable, it is actually hard and heavy. When encountered on the street, Monk’s intervention alternately recedes into the background of city life or else foregrounds itself as an uncanny and unchanging presence in an otherwise ever-shifting world.
It reveals the artist’s own complex double take on art’s relation to objecthood, art history and the readymade; in contrast to Duchamp, Monk’s is not a straightforward or functional facsimile of its subject matter, but a metaphorical critique of art in the public realm, both complicated and weighed down by its own being.
It reveals the artist’s own complex double take on art’s relation to objecthood, art history and the readymade; in contrast to Duchamp, Monk’s is not a straightforward or functional facsimile of its subject matter, but a metaphorical critique of art in the public realm, both complicated and weighed down by its own being.
