CARLONE CONTEMPORARY: Rona Pondick Monkeys, 1998-2001

A horde of monkeys will descend on the Carlone Hall at the Upper Belvedere! They are hybrid creatures with human parts: Monkeys by Rona Pondick adopts the Baroque ambience’s playful engagement with distance and proximity to the viewer. The Belvedere will be showing this work in the series CARLONE CONTEMPORARY.

Magical human-animal hybrids have populated the artist’s sculptural world since the year 2000. The cavorting monkeys incorporating parts of the human body are simultaneously wild, erotic, aggressive, and whimsical; the human face—the artist herself—either suffering or ecstatic. An overriding impression of ambivalence exists, of attraction and repulsion, and of other often contradictory impulses and drives.

From Egyptian sphinxes and deities, Greek centaurs, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to mermaids in fairy-tales, chimera have exerted a fascination since time immemorial. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is arguably the most famous example from modern times, and was a source of inspiration for the artist.