Jonathan Monk’s (b. UK, 1969) ‘Metallic Sunset with additional Information’ is a series which was created for the exhibition 'Metallic Sunset' at Dvir gallery. Formed by a single image of the Sunset Boulevard in which each piece is combined with different objects, the combination is made in a associative way with a wink to art history to the likes of artist like Haim Steinbach’s Mike Kelley.
British artist Jonathan Monk replays, recasts and re-examines seminal works of Conceptual and Minimal art by variously witty, ingenious and irreverent means.
Speaking in 2009, he said, “Appropriation is something I have used or worked with in my art since starting art school in 1987. At this time (and still now) I realised that being original was almost impossible, so I tried using what was already available as source material for my own work.”
Through wall paintings, monochromes, ephemeral sculpture and pho- tography he reflects on the tendency of contemporary art to devour ref- erences, simultaneously paying homage to figures such as Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman and Lawrence Weiner, while demystifying the creative process.


“Metallic Sunsets is a new series of digital UV cured print assemblages, based on None of the Buildings on Sunset Strip, a group of photographs I made in Los Angeles in 1997, inspired by Ed Ruscha’s famous book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966).
I recently tried to remember exactly what motivated me to walk along the Sunset Strip and photograph the streets leading away from this once iconic boulevard...
This is a kind of introspective retrospective, a behind the scenes where the camera looks at the process of making a picture.
I was living in Hollywood at the time – Ed Ruscha was still the godfather of dry point and shoot photography, along with more conceptually motivated John Baldessari et al – Los Angeles felt like it contained the human side of ideas-based art... this always felt ironic when thinking about Los Angeles... cars & freeways, movie stars & lost dreams...
But this was a kind of photography I could relate to or at least mimic in a straight forward point and shoot kind of way.
What did encourage me to take my father’s somewhat broken 40-year-old camera, two rolls of 35 mm black and white film, no light meter and head towards the sunset hoping for the best?
My research continues...”
Jonathan Monk