Ryan Gander and Jonathan Monk: Assembly

Yvon Lambert Paris is pleased to present Assembly, a new collaborative project by Ryan Gander and Jonathan Monk. The exhibition will open on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 and will be on view until December 23.

The artists Ryan Gander and Jonathan Monk wish to meet each other for the first time on the night of the opening. A Polaroid print, displayed on the wall of the gallery for the duration of the exhibition, will serve as the immediate and indisputable proof of this encounter.

The conceptual meeting is recurrent in Jonathan Monk’s work: Meeting #17, a vinyl wall-text inviting people to meet at "Piccadilly Circus London 23rd July 2005 noon" (1999), or Meeting #13, (Book Works and Yvon Lambert, 2000) a simple envelope which contains an invitation to meet with the artist at the Eiffel Tower on October 13, 2008 at noon. For his personal exhibition at the MUMOK Vienna in 2007, Ryan Gander designed a set of double-sided playing cards (Parallel Cards, 2007), allowing the players to invent their own game, to get to know each other's, to see two realms at once.

The image exposed, a posteriori, of Gander and Monk's meeting, if they do in fact meet, illustrates the words of Paul Valéry, "A work of art should always teach us that we have not seen what we see".

Jonathan Monk was born in 1969 in Leicester, United Kingdom. He lives and works in Berlin. Ryan Gander was born in 1976 in Chester, United Kingdom. He lives and works in London.

Ryan Gander and Jonathan Monk
Assembly