Contemporary artist Ian Monroe is to show a new series of two dimensional works and sculpture for his second solo exhibition at Haunch of Venison London.

Monroe’s constructed images of cavernous interior spaces, populated with schematic forms and organised geometric shapes, depict deep frenetic posthuman wastelands and futuristic architectures. The works begin as full scale manual drawings which are translated into meticulously constructed, hand-cut vinyl shapes, the clean blocks of colour and text arranged and layered to create shadow and depth. Monroe’s work delineates spaces resistant to scale, simultaneously the microchip and the monumental office building, arenas for as yet undisclosed events and undetermined inhabitants.

The main focus of the exhibition will be five new, constructed images made entirely of various black, white and grey vinyls, alongside three new sculptures. The reduced palette in the works functions like a compressed digital file, in which various black materials become ‘approximations’ for colours and tones, echoing the way perspectival space is an approximation of a three dimensional space.

The works continue Monroe’s investigation into the structures and infrastructures that facilitate and manipulate our interface with the inherent geometry of the built environment. For most of us Architecture is handed down to us from above, needs are assumed, demographics consulted and made manifest in concrete and fibre-optics, the result being tantalizingly limitless and malleable, but this is a potential energy only. We are all nomads of the lobby, the computer game, the banking system; locations through which both ourselves and our production pass, but systems whose ultimate success depends on us leaving no mark, no disturbance.

On his own work Monroe comments, “Like the invisible yet immense forces in a sub-basement column of a skyscraper, there is a liminal inertia that surrounds us. Physics tells us that in any system, for every amount of order there has to be an equal disordering, and thus the future is inevitably tinged with melancholy, no matter how crisp and fluorescent.”

For further information and images please contact: Claire Walsh Call +44 (0) 20 7495 5050 or email claire.walsh@haunchofvenison.com

Editors’ Notes
Ian Monroe (b. New York, 1972) lives and works in London, graduated from Goldsmiths 2003 and came to public attention later in the same year with largescale work at the opening exhibition at the former Saatchi gallery, County Hall. Monroe was included in Edge of the Real, a group painting show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2004 and had his first UK solo exhibition, They Built Upon It, at Haunch of Venison accompanied by the first major catalogue of Monroe’s work that included texts by poet and art critic, Barry Schwabsky, and art writer, Sally O’Reilly. Monroe’s most recent exhibitions include participation in the Marx Collection at the Hamburg Bahnhof, 2005, and a solo show at Upstairs, Berlin, 2006.