Photographer
Jonathan Monk
Jonathan Monk (b. 1969, United Kingdom) is a British contemporary artist whose work often engages with the history of conceptual art, frequently incorporating photography, text, and installation. His practice is known for its playful, ironic, and self-referential qualities.
Monk often revisits and reinterprets works by earlier conceptual artists, using repetition, appropriation, and subtle variation to question authorship, originality, and artistic value. Photography plays a key role in documenting and extending these conceptual gestures.
His work has been widely exhibited internationally and is included in major collections. For collectors, Monk’s work is valued for its intellectual wit, conceptual rigor, and its dialogue with the legacy of 20th-century conceptual art.
Jonathan Monk is a British conceptual artist born in Leicester in 1969. His work spans photography, sculpture, and painting, often referencing art history and everyday life. He has exhibited internationally and is known for generating new works from pre-existing ideas.
Selected Works & Key Projects
A source-backed introduction to individual photographs and significant bodies of work.
Key projects
Project · 1995–1997
Waiting for Famous People
Made between 1995 and 1997, this photographic series records Monk at an airport arrivals gate holding handmade name signs. The proposed arrivals range across artists, public figures, musicians, fictional characters, deceased people, and “Mom”; the gallery notes that some could never arrive. The project therefore turns an ordinary documentary-looking airport picture into a staged performance of expectation, recognition, and absence. It merits selection because its serial self-portraits make Monk’s use of photography, humour, art-world reference, and autobiographical material immediately legible within one sustained body of work.
View source ↗
Project · 1997–1999
None of the Buildings on Sunset Strip
Produced while Monk lived in Los Angeles, None of the Buildings on Sunset Strip is a series of photographs showing the roads between buildings. Lisson Gallery identifies it as a follow-up to Ed Ruscha’s 1966 artist’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, while Monk’s title reverses Ruscha’s exhaustive premise. The project matters as a precise photographic reworking of a known artist-book model: rather than cataloguing façades, it makes the omitted spaces its subject. It merits selection because the series directly joins Monk’s Los Angeles period to his sustained practice of recasting earlier Conceptual and photographic procedures.
View source ↗Project · 2002
One Moment in Time (Kitchen)
This 2002, seven-minute-and-six-second 35 mm slide projection derives from photographs, postcards, and ephemera displayed in Monk’s mother’s kitchen. For the work, Monk telephoned his sister, asked her to describe the items one by one, transcribed those descriptions, and photographed the typed texts as slides. Instead of reproducing family pictures, it uses verbal surrogates for them. This makes the work a significant selection from Monk’s photographic practice: it treats photography as a trigger for memory and description rather than as a transparent visual record, and MoMA included it in New Photography 2006.
View source ↗Selected photographs
2005 · Manhattan, New York, United States
All the Sizes Available in All the Sizes Available (Manhattan)
This work comprises seven digital photographs, printed as Fujicolor prints in varying dimensions. The Photographic Resource Center states that Monk appropriated a Manhattan-skyline image from the Berlin commercial photography laboratory where he printed his own work. The choice of a lab image makes reproduction itself part of the subject: a commercial sample picture is repositioned as an authored, serial artwork. It merits selection because the work explicitly addresses the serial and reproductive character of photography while retaining Monk’s deadpan, everyday source material; it also appeared in the Center’s artist-focused presentation of contemporary photographic practice.
Work source ↗
2002
(OK 70)… I went
Centre Pompidou catalogues this 2002 work as a photograph from Monk’s Keep Still series, made with collage, a gelatin-silver print, and paper elements. In the series, Monk collected photographs of anonymous groups and positioned letters above individual heads to form titles of works by 1960s and 1970s artists. The museum describes this conjunction of anonymous people and avant-garde names as a way of claiming admired artists as a group or family. It merits selection because it makes appropriation operate at the scale of an individual vernacular photograph and is held in the Centre Pompidou photography collection.
Work source ↗2001
Keep still (Bruce Nauman, Performance Corridor)
This unique 2001 work is a black-and-white vintage photograph bearing Letraset text. Its gallery record places it within Keep Still, a series in which Monk reappropriates found photographs and adds one letter to each figure’s head so that the figures collectively spell the title of a Conceptual artwork. Here the parenthetical reference names Bruce Nauman’s Performance Corridor. The photograph merits selection as a compact, clearly identified example of Monk’s method: a found image is not merely reproduced, but reorganized through lettering so that an anonymous social scene becomes an art-historical citation.
Work source ↗1996
If Only
MoMA records If Only as a 1996 work made from cut-and-pasted printed paper, a gelatin-silver print, and pencil on paper. Its hybrid construction places a photographic print inside a deliberately hand-worked paper object rather than presenting photography as a self-contained image. The work merits selection because it is preserved in MoMA’s collection through the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift, providing a documented institutional context for Monk’s early use of photographic material. It is also a useful individual counterpoint to his later slide projections and photo-based series: photographic reproduction here becomes one element in a collage procedure.
Work source ↗
2007
Frank Sinatra Piece
Zabludowicz Collection describes Frank Sinatra Piece as a photograph of a reproduction of Bruce Nauman’s From Hand To Mouth (1967), to which Monk added turquoise earrings, creating an abbreviated portrait of Frank Sinatra. The work uses a photograph of a reproduction rather than direct access to the cited artwork, then makes a minimal alteration that redirects its identification. It merits selection because the collection explicitly situates it alongside practices of remaking, appropriation, and repetition, including Sherrie Levine’s rephotography of Walker Evans reproductions. It is a concise photographic statement of Monk’s art-historical relay system.
Work source ↗-
1969
Career milestone
Born in Leicester
Jonathan Monk was born in Leicester, United Kingdom.
Source: Lisson Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026
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1988
Education
BFA, Leicester Polytechnic
Monk received a BFA from Leicester Polytechnic.
Source: Lisson Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026
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1991
Education
MFA, Glasgow School of Art
Monk received an MFA from Glasgow School of Art.
Source: Lisson Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026
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1995–1997
Series
Waiting for Famous People
Monk made the airport-based photographic series Waiting for Famous People, in which he holds signs for a range of named arrivals.
Source: Galleri Nicolai Wallner Verified Sep 3, 2026
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1997–1999
Series
None of the Buildings on Sunset Strip
While living in Los Angeles, Monk made a photographic series showing roads between buildings as a follow-up to Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip.
Source: Lisson Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026
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September 21, 2006–January 8, 2007
Exhibition
New Photography 2006
MoMA presented Monk in New Photography 2006 with Barbara Probst and Jules Spinatsch; the exhibition included One Moment in Time (Kitchen).
Source: Museum of Modern Art Verified Sep 3, 2026
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2009
Exhibition
53rd Venice Biennale participation
Monk’s work was included in the 53rd Venice Biennale.
Source: Lisson Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026
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2012
Award
Prix du Quartier des Bains
Monk received the Prix du Quartier des Bains in Geneva.
Source: Lisson Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026
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2019
Exhibition
Exhibit Model Four – plus invited guests
KINDL Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin, hosted Monk’s solo exhibition Exhibit Model Four – plus invited guests.
Source: Lisson Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026
Representation
Lisson Gallery
Jonathan Monk is represented by Lisson Gallery, which has exhibited his works in multiple international projects.
Verified 2026-09-03Lisson Gallery
Collection
Tate Collection
Tate holds works by Jonathan Monk, reflecting his significance in contemporary art.
Verified 2026-09-03Tate
Jonathan Monk (opens a new site)
The Photographic Resource Center profile addresses Monk’s use of seriality, reproduction, and the ontology of photography, and identifies the source image and structure of All the Sizes Available in All the Sizes Available (Manhattan).
New Photography 2006: Jonathan Monk, Barbara Probst, Jules Spinatsch (opens a new site)
MoMA’s exhibition release introduces Monk’s photographic and slide-based work in New Photography 2006 and explains the production of One Moment in Time (Kitchen).
A picture of a picture: Jonathan Monk on René Daniëls (opens a new site)
In this interview, Monk discusses the Exhibit Model installations, explaining their use of documentation to assemble works across different spaces and their relation to exhibition-making.
In Baltimore, a Slide Showcase (opens a new site)
A Washington Post review of the Baltimore Museum of Art’s SlideShow exhibition discusses One Moment in Time (Kitchen) as a looping sequence of textual descriptions of images and ephemera in Monk’s mother’s kitchen.
Jonathan Monk Interview: An Original Twist (opens a new site)
Louisiana Channel’s interview records Monk discussing originality, appropriation, and the practical conditions that shaped his conceptual approach. It was filmed at Galleri Nicolai Wallner in Copenhagen in November 2016.
Watch now: Jonathan Monk discusses his new exhibition ‘Not Me, Me’ (opens a new site)
Lisson Gallery’s exhibition video accompanies Monk’s 2021 presentation Not Me, Me. Monk discusses using material amassed over fifteen years; the walkthrough includes object collages titled Exhibit Model Detail with Additional Information and sculptural busts made with Italian artists.
Jonathan Monk on Alighiero e Boetti (opens a new site)
Dia Art Foundation presents this recording of Monk’s April 28, 2014 talk on Alighiero e Boetti, made for Dia’s Artists on Artists Lecture Series at Dia:Chelsea.
Weegee
Shared publisher: Presentation House Gallery
14 photobook(s) in the library
Mark Ruwedel
Shared publisher: Presentation House Gallery
9 photobook(s) in the library
Roy Arden
Shared publisher: Presentation House Gallery
5 photobook(s) in the library
Jeremy Shaw
Shared publisher: Presentation House Gallery
2 photobook(s) in the library
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