James Fuentes is very pleased to announce Keegan Monaghan, IN, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.


Monaghan writes:

"In my previous paintings, an image’s legibility, while potentially slow, always culminates in a moment of recognition; the shadow of a plant on a floor, a figure beyond the slats of venetian blinds, sky reflected in water underneath a drain. With this most recent work, however, there can be no consensus in regard to what we are looking at. As in earlier paintings, the same methods of obfuscation are utilized: tight cropping, impressionistic brushwork, highly textured surfaces, a hazy screen of optically mixed color. But the image has become more elemental, the closeup has become tighter and, as a result, these are paintings of details in which the larger form and context is withheld and ultimately unknowable.

Yet, there remains a familiar quality to these forms. Based in part on quotidian objects such as drains, moulding, and shelving, the paintings hover between contradictory perspectives. They feel enormous and tiny. Mundane and mysterious. Identifiable and unnamable. From a distance they suggest certain materials like stone, metal, or plastic but up close break down to disconnected patches of paint. The impressionistic quality of the light and the handling of the paint suggest observational life painting but the forms are simultaneously imagined and unreal. As is the case with even the most commonplace in life, these paintings change, open up, and become more puzzling the longer you look at them."


Keegan Monaghan (b. 1986 Evanston, IL) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union. Solo exhibitions include Indicator (2022), Threads (2020) and Incoming (2018) at James Fuentes, New York; Enter the Nose (2023) and Bowl of Food (2020) at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; You decide to take a walk, On Stellar Rays, New York (2016); and Total Recall, OLD ROOM, New York (2025). He has been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2019) and in group exhibitions at White Columns, Jeffrey Deitch, Candace Madey, Simone Subal Gallery, On Stellar Rays, and OLD ROOM in New York. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.