Bob Monk, a Gagosian director who was with the gallery for greater than 20 years, working intently with artists comparable to Ed Ruscha and Richard Artschwager, died on December 15 at 75. His ex-wife, Wendy Monk, mentioned the trigger was issues from a coronary heart situation.
Monk was a quiet drive of the New York artwork market, with a CV that included working for seller Leo Castelli and Sotheby’s, to say little of the gallery that Monk himself cofounded. Throughout a number of many years, he established himself as a quiet drive of the town’s market ecosystem.
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Born in 1950, Monk grew up in Lengthy Island, then moved along with his household to Brooklyn. He attended Pratt Institute in New York, the place he studied pictures.
He began his profession within the artwork market at Leo Castelli Gallery, the place he started as an assistant earlier than turning into director of prints at Castelli Graphics, a prints-focused operation, in 1978. “I went to artwork faculty as a practising artist and fell into the Castelli Gallery,” Monk mentioned in a 2015 oral historical past. “Leo grew to become this unimaginable mentor to me, as did Ileana Sonnabend, whom I met, in fact, via Leo.”
By means of Castelli Graphics, he received to know stars of the period, together with Robert Rauschenberg, whom Monk befriended. “If he might hug everybody on the earth, he would,” Monk as soon as mentioned of Rauschenberg.
In 1985, Monk cut up off, founding his personal SoHo gallery with Susan Lorence. That enterprise, Lorence-Monk Gallery, confirmed artists comparable to Jasper Johns, Alan Saret, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Bruce Nauman, and David Hockney, and ran till 1992, when Monk joined Sotheby’s as the top of the modern prints division. In 1995, he was promoted to move of the modern artwork division.
By the late ’90s, Monk had joined Gagosian, the place he liaised with Ruscha, a longtime buddy who by then had joined the gallery’s roster. The 2 labored collectively on tasks comparable to Ruscha’s 2022 Museum of Fashionable Artwork retrospective. Monk additionally helped Artschwager, one other Gagosian artist, in conceiving a set of elevators for the Whitney Museum previous to the artist’s dying. Monk left Gagosian in 2024.
“I had the good pleasure of working with Bob alongside Ed Ruscha for a variety of years,” Leta Garzan, a director at Gagosian, mentioned in a press release to ARTnews. “Bob was all the time desperate to share his many years of expertise and he introduced extraordinary dedication, generosity, and integrity to all the pieces he did. His spirit and numerous contributions to Gagosian will lengthy be remembered.”
Monk is survived by his three kids, Andrew, Spencer, and Julia, in addition to by his grandchildren Lucy and Ellis.
