Anthony Mundy is a British multi media artist based in North Yorkshire. He completed his studies at the Royal College of Art in 2020 and has gone on to have solo and group shows with a variety of works in solvent printmaking, sculpture, and paint. He exhibited at New Designers in 2018 and has also participated in festivals such as Deptford X Fringe in 2019. Mundy is currently showcasing artwork in Margate at Cuckoo gallery until January 2024, and is preparing for his successive solo exhibition in London later in November.
Solvent printmaking, collage, sculpture and paintings are inspired by the culture surrounding Club 57 of downtown Manhattan 1979 – 1984. Associated with Keith Haring and queer culture, Club 57 is known to have brought visibility to previously suppressed communities and allowed for a freedom of expression when the external environment was not adoptive of that. Access to Xerox allowed for quick and inexpensive printing, democratising imagery in a segregated art scene. His body of work recreates this atmosphere with the application of various production techniques. The process is always analytical and symbolic in its hypothesising of a solution. Fractured or mirrored imagery, besides being a mishap in Xerox printing, stands for more significant questions relating to the artists relationship to an emotional landscape. Regardless of medium, it is completely physical. It requires significant pressure, scraping, and sometimes carving into surfaces with a variety of tools for an image to successfully appear. Where it feels like the artistic action has a consequence through a ‘homeopathic’ mark.
Gender identity, sexuality, and grief are themes that run through Mundy’s practice, there to encourage reflection through subdued colours and subtle compositional changes. In today's society, Mundy takes on the task of challenging traditional masculinity and the expectations it imposes on men. However, the rigidity of archaic masculinity often hinders its alignment with the contemporary needs of men and their sexual identity. Mundy emphasises that when individuals find themselves unable to articulate their emotions through conventional verbal language, they become prisoners of these antiquated confines.
Solvent printmaking entered Mundy’s practice in 2020 and allowed the above-mentioned characteristics to be more comprehensively explored. Previously working with screen-printing and lithography, Mundy was frustrated with the technique’s machinery and lack of physical engagement. Compositions veer towards the ‘surreal’ and bring to mind the German Dadaist Hannah Höch’s photomontages, whose critical abilities lay in ‘the radical techniques of disorientation, negation, and disjunction’ (www.metmuseum.org Hannah Höch ‘Weltrevolution’). A stairway is a frequent motif, and so is a series of eyes, telling of transition and perception.
For more information or general enquiries please contact anna@novarelations.com or anthony.mundystudio@gmail.com.
