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Eager Pleaser; Strauss
Artist Matthew Monahan (1972)
Title Eager Pleaser; Strauss
Year 2002
Material Charcoal on paper
About the work There is something strange about these two artworks. Both portraits are drawn on partially crumpled paper, but here and there the facial features follow the creases in the paper, giving the faces a certain vulnerability. At the same time, the faces seem trapped in the material – as if frozen in a particular state of mind.
About the artist Monahan creates sculptures and drawings, playing with the materials he uses to fabricate them. He turns a drawing into a three-dimensional sculpture, for instance. Or he uses a fork or pencil to manipulate the back of a double-folded sheet of paper so that the paint seeps through on the front. These processes create beings that are somewhere between humans, gods from ancient religions and characters from science fiction. Monahan studied at the Cooper Union School of Arts in New York and was an artist-in-residence at De Ateliers in Amsterdam from 1994 to 1996. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
In the collection Both works were purchased in 2002. Four years earlier, in 1998, Monahan had a solo exhibition in De Nederlandsche Bank’s art gallery, titled Fools Gold. Over a 20-year period, De Nederlandsche Bank has acquired a total of eight works by Monahan.
