Matthew Monahan

🗿🔳Matthew Monahan (born 1972) is an American contemporary artist based in Los Angeles.

Monahan graduated from Cooper Union School of Art in 1994 with a BFA and the De Ateliers in Amsterdam from 1994 to 1996.

Matthew Monahan’s work presents futuristic archaeology. Drawing from a wide range of influences, from Modernist art to ancient totems, Monahan’s ‘artifacts’ are both familiar and strange.

Filtering historical mythologies through his own personal system of reference, altered further through the experience of making, Monahan’s work alludes to a contemporary spirituality, where beauty and brutality coalesce as virtual monuments. 

Matthew Monahan’s sculptures strive to recondite technological advancement and social flux with archaic spiritualism. Stylistically drawing from Constructivist artists such as Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, Monahan’s abstracted assemblages capture a lost spirit of ideological innocence; presented in the contemporary context, they also allude to its corruption.

His makeshift sculptures act as an impetus for aesthetic contemplation; their geometric composition suggests an architectural maquette, modeling an ancient and advanced society more enlightened than our own.

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