Matthew Monahan

Matthew Monahan’s sculpture comes across like a melancholy strain of late late postmodernism. In the front gallery, five works riff on the idea of the body as fragmented vessel. Monahan’s hybrids are far from delirious, though. ‘Scoria Pyre’ and ‘Ziggurat’ appear to marry formal indignities – a head sliced in half, a peeling torso – with an idea of influence as scarring and destructive. These are works that seem assailed and disfigured by history, their references – ranging from Olmec and African carving to constructivism – adding up to what looks like an embodiment of existential pain. (MC)