Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp

Monroe’s large-scale ensemble StarZ consists of ten gigantic portraits printed on canvas, thirty-odd mid-size portraits on cardboard in photographically rendered golden frames, many more smaller photographs, one video and a number of texts; in the ten large-scale portraits, Monroe dresses up as the grotesque alter ego of a handful of history’s greats: the pope, the patriarch of the orthodox church, Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin, the Mona Lisa, La Cicciolina – and Marilyn Monroe herself of course. The materials used in these portraits are mostly (and exceptionally) banal, impoverished household goods: in his portrait of the pope for instance, the artist appears swathed in see-through kitchen foil. On the longer term, Monroe is planning a quasi-endless portrait gallery of such stars, critically or sentimentally reducing these personages to exchangeable cloned alter egos and hybrids of the artist himself, resulting in a revised world history whose pathology is only matched by its melancholy.