LONDON.- Pace Gallery will present a solo booth of new work by British painter William Monk at Frieze London 2025. The presentation brings together entirely new paintings and works on paper and coincides with the release of the artist’s first comprehensive monograph, published by Phaidon in June 2025.

Produced over the course of the past year, following his travels to the islands of Conica and Mallorca, this presentation weaves threads from Monk’s earlier series into a new body of work. Central to the presentation is the figure of the sentinel: solitary, watchful, and quietly enduring. Impressions of the Mediterranean saturate this figure’s surroundings, which meditate as much on memory and perception as on the specific features of the coastal landscape. Cacti emerge as a central motif in Monk’s new paintings. Abstracted into swathes of vibrant color, their pin-pricked ovoid forms blur the line between the real and surreal—a tension that is fundamental to his practice.

Throughout his work, Monk summons references to images both real and fictive. One such source is his own hazy teenage memory of the deserted island at the center of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1990 film Aventura. Both Antonioni’s movie and Monk’s work share a spirit of metaphysical surrealism: dreamlike landscapes and deserted architecture are rendered with sharp contrasts of light and shadow, producing a sense of dislocation in space and time. In a series of small paintings that Monk started during a month-long residency at the Neuerdorf House on Mallorca in 2024, island-changing skies and shifting light become subjects in themselves. These atmospheric paintings seem almost to lurk on the horizon. In some works, serenity prevails; in others, a foreboding presence appears to lurk on the horizon.

Imagery from Monk’s earlier work, particularly the Fermanseries, which drew partly on the figure of Charon, the undertaker of Greek mythology, has mutated and evolved in these new canvases. The presence Monk once called the Ferryman has now transformed. No longer just a harbinger of death, it has been reimagined as a sentinel: a guard or watcher of crossings and thresholds. Monk’s sentinel embodies these notions of transformation and passage. The painting which acts as a framing device for the production of cacti within. At this scale, the painting becomes a portal into Monk’s oscillating vision. Further into the background, the upper band of a building completes the composition, bridging the ancient and monumental with cinematic style and form.

The presentation at Frieze also marks something of an artistic homecoming for the British artist, who has lived in New York for the past decade and last showed in London in 2019. It follows Monk’s major touring museum exhibition Psychopomp, which opened at the Long Museum, Shanghai, in 2024, before traveling to the Silang Art Museum, Beijing, and the He Art Museum, Shunde.

For his atmospheric, dreamlike imagery, William Monk (b. 1977, Kingston upon Thames, United Kingdom) creates portals into real and imagined realms, drawing on landscape, memory, and myth. He was awarded the Koninklijke Prijs voor Vrije Schilderkunst (Dutch Royal Award for Painting) in 2009, the Jerwood Contemporary Painters Prize, Monk’s work has previously been exhibited at Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands (2006); Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (2007); Project Space Leeds, United Kingdom (2009); Summerfield Gallery, Cheltenham, United Kingdom (2009); Norwich University College of the Arts, United Kingdom (2010); Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Netherlands (2017); Het Valkhof, Nijmegen, the Netherlands (2020); Long Museum, Shanghai (2024); He Art Museum, Shunde, China (2024); and Singer Laren, the Netherlands (2024-25). His work is held in public collections worldwide, including the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam, Blenheim Palace, United Kingdom; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands; He Art Museum, Shunde, China; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Netherlands; Long Museum, Shanghai; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. Monk lives and works in New York City.