"Smoking nude, Beverly Hills 1991"

gelatin silver print mounted on cardboard

titled, dated and numbered on lable, signed on verso

The picture is part of the series Newton Illustrated, which was created for an exhibition at the Mezzanin Gallery in Vienna in 2006. For the exhibition, the two artists Jonathan Monk (born 1969) and Richard Prince (born 1949) were invited to work with re-stagings of already established complexes of meaning.
For Jonathan Monk, repetition is to be taken literally. In his works, Monk repeatedly engages with masters of minimal art and conceptual art. His “repetitions” often depict the dislocations and consequences of an idea. Executions of graphic instructions by Sol Lewitt or realizations of ideas and concepts by Ed Ruscha or Robert Barry expose gaps in their concepts and form a critical loop in the perception of their works. They are a relational commentary on questions of production and perception.
Monk has responded to the invitation to show his work in Vienna with a series of twelve dyptichs entitled Newton Illustrated, which were created especially for this exhibition. Monk's Newton Illustrated is a series of re-photographs of the magazine of the same name published by Helmut Newton between 1985 and 1995. Newton Illustrated was published in four issues and brings together mannered stagings of typical Newton models, photographs of stars such as Sigourney Weaver, Kim Basinger or Angelica Houston, as well as of charged symbols of the avant-garde such as the Empire State Building or a locomotive. Situated between popular magazine culture and artistic reflection, Newton ironizes attributions from both sides. Monk breaks with the glossy aesthetics of Newton's photographs by doing nothing more than photographing the open magazine. He adopts the layout of portrait and landscape photographs and the photos lose their original gloss, their claim to perfection. The “snapping off” of the magazines corresponds to the process of visual consumption, but it is also able to adjust Newton's media-charged images. With Newton Illustrated, Jonathan Monk takes a look at the potential of conceptual strategies. The construction of identities in Newton is broken. Monk succeeds in adding another category to the categories of affirmation and critical deconstruction, the production of usable images.
(Eva Maria Stadler, from the press release for the exhibition Jonathan Monk, Richard Price: Newton Illustrated / Upstate, Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna 2006, retrieved 4.2.2025)