Born in Leicester, England, in 1969 and now based in Berlin, Jonathan Monk works across a wide range of media, including installation, photography, film, sculpture, and performance. His flippant practice often echoes the procedural strategies of 1960s Conceptualism, yet eschews its utopian ambitions and notions of artistic genius. Instead, Monk anchors his conceptual approach in the everyday, drawing on personal history, family life, and even pets, while still alluding to the systems and processes rigorously employed by artists such as Sol LeWitt.

In the Keep Still series, Monk reappropriates found photographs by placing a single letter on each figure’s head, together spelling the title of a conceptual artwork. In Keep Still (Gilbert & George, Human Sculpture), he references Gilbert & George’s 1969 black-and-white photograph of the artists posing in a landscape, titled Human Sculpture in black lettering.