For the first time in De Pont Museum: Matthew Monahan Left Hand Path

This autumn, De Pont Museum presents Left Hand Path, an exhibition by American artist Matthew Monahan (1972, Eureka, USA). At its centre are two recently acquired sculptures and a generous gift from the artist to the museum, comprising sculptures and works on paper, including two wall-spanning series. Created between 2012 and 2023, the works offer a multifaceted view of Monahan's richly layered body of work, in which the human figure continually shifts between past and future, vulnerability and strength, creation and destruction.

The exhibition also marks a special reunion. Exactly thirty years ago, in 1996, Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen – then a curator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and now director of De Pont Museum – organised Monahan’s first museum exhibition in the Netherlands, Zeno’s Quiver. The exhibition took place at a pivotal moment in the young artist’s development, when his practice was increasingly shaped by what he described as ‘the desire to make a figure’. At the height of postmodern appropriation, Monahan embarked on a paradoxical and untimely return to a figurative art born entirely of the imagination. In doing so, he turned ‘a historical dead end into an artistic time machine’.

The human figure remains the point of departure for Monahan’s drawings, sculptures and installations, although its meaning is never unambiguous. His enigmatic creations are at once figurative and abstract, familiar and estranging. They evoke religious and ancient sculpture, but equally imagery drawn from science fiction. Monahan’s works resemble archaeological finds from a future yet to arrive, as though different temporalities had converged within them.

Left Hand Path
The title Left Hand Path refers to an individual route beyond established conventions and to Western esoteric traditions, in which the term signifies transformation through breaking down, separating and rearranging. ‘The left-handed person pushes against the paper, smearing the ink, carving their way forward, embossing the material beneath. Ideas and images come from this hand,’ says Monahan.

In his choice and handling of materials, too, Monahan continually seeks out the unexpected. What appears from a distance to be paper proves, on closer inspection, to be folded and modelled bronze or aluminium. Conversely, reliefs that look as though they have been carved from stone, such as Dum-Dum and Wadcutter (both 2016), are constructed from 160 black-and-white prints laminated in layers. Their powerful, three-dimensional forms emerged when Monahan shot the reliefs to pieces from behind. Their titles refer to the bullets he used in the process.

This radical intervention encapsulates one of the central motifs of Monahan’s oeuvre: creation and destruction are inextricably linked. His sculptures and reliefs appear to have been torn apart and subsequently reassembled. Fragmented, distorted and turned inside out, they seem both wounded and unyielding.

With Left Hand Path, artist and curator reunite thirty years later at De Pont Museum. Monahan’s singular approach to the human figure adds a distinctive new voice to the museum’s collection while opening up unexpected dialogues around the body, material transformation and the continually shifting relationship between past and present.

Work by Matthew Monahan is currently also on view in GEN X: Tales from the Forgotten Generation at the DESTE Foundation in Athens (until 26 November 2026). His work has previously been presented in solo and group exhibitions at, among others, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007 and 2011); The 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2008); The 7th Gwangju Biennale 2008, Gwangju (2008); MoMA, New York (2012); Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2012); The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Altemps, Rome (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); and Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2023).

More information or contact:

Beau Swierstra
pressoffice@depont.nl