Peter Monkman: Changing Face
Lewis Elton Gallery, University of Surrey
14th - 27th July 2008
A touring exhibition by Watts Gallery as part of the Guildford Festival
Peter Monkman
Changeling
2006 (c) the artist
Peter Monkman
Wrenn Portrait No. 1
(c) the artist
Monkman questions the notion of a fixed identity of the face through painting portraits of people, young and old, from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds. The exhibition presents portraits of students from Wrenn School, a Comprehensive in Northamptonshire, Charterhouse, a Private school in Surrey and archival portraits from Charterhouse. Peter Monkman is Director of Art at Charterhouse.
Peter Monkman is a figurative painter whose work is particularly concerned with the concept of identity. Monkman’s work explores emerging identities of adolescents from different social and cultural backgrounds, the changing identities of his own children in the process of growing up and distinct identities of public personas known to the artist. Viewed collectively, the work also raises broader questions relating to education, institutions and class and the way we perceive individuals within these contexts. For sixteen years Monkman taught art in the State sector and since 2003 he has worked as Director of Art at Charterhouse, which has provided much inspiration. As the artist points out ‘Watts Gallery and Charterhouse share not only locality but also a Victorian past which has an impact on the present. The historical gravitas of Watts’s portraits of families, friends, eminent public personas, the bourgeois, the prosperous and the underprivileged in which aesthetics and politics come together will provide a very relevant context in which my portraits can be interpreted’.
Monkman originally trained as an artist in the 1980s and aspects of his earlier practice involved abstraction using automatic drawing and painting , based on memory, time and spontaneous instant reactions of the brain to visual stimuli. In 1999 Peter’s striking photo-realist portrait of his new born son ‘Joe-boy’ was selected for the BP Portrait Awards Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and this marked the artist’s increased preoccupation with the genre of portraiture, which has subsequently become his favourite artistic vehicle. Monkman has since been featured in two further BP Portrait Awards (2001, 2003) as well as at the Science Museum’s ‘Future Face’ (2005), Drawing on Time at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (2000) , and ‘Face Value’ at Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery (2003) showing head studies of students from a Northamptonshire state school (see left), which as the artist said ‘challenged the way we categorise youth educationally and socially’.
Notably, Monkman describes his portraiture practice as ‘responding to the face in a physiognomic way with no initial intention to convey any specific personality traits or qualities’. According to the artist, these qualities inevitably emerge throughout the creative process when the portrait ‘starts communicating back to the painter, and on completion, it is down to the viewer how the face and personality is interpreted. The portrait becomes removed from the sitter and creates a life of its own depending on the context in which it is exhibited’. Monkman also emphasises that he does not create his art in a cultural vacuum, but rather consciously draws on iconic images from art history from past centuries as well as the contemporary art scene in order to create new identities. Leading contemporary figurative painters such as Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans and Michael Borremans have been sources of inspiration alongside Rembrandt, Van Eyck and G. F. Watts, whose double portrait of ‘Long Mary’ served as a starting point for Monkman’s double portrait of his daughter.
The exhibition will present the evolution of Monkman’s long preoccupation with the concept of identity, representing diverse individuals on a level playing field through the democratic vehicle of portraiture.
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