(born Paris in 1924)
‘Meurtre No VI’, titled, signed and dated Monory 1968 on the reverse, inscribed No 310/2, oil on canvas, behind Plexiglas with genuine bullet holes, 119.5 x 65.5 cm, artist’s metal frame, (PP)

The work has been registered by the Jacques Monory archive.

Provenance:
Private Collection, Austria – acquired directly from the artist in 1968 (correspondence available)

Jacques Monory “became one of the principal representatives of the French figuration narrative movement, which, in the Sixties, was opposed to geometrical, kinetic or abstract expressionist painting and sympathetic to the art of the New Realism movement. His canvases suggest heavy atmospheres while pulling subject matter from modern civilization, often using silkscreen processes that borrow from photographic and cinematographic sources, and a reliance on monochrome color.“ (Text: Ro Gallery, New York) Then the black pole emerges, that of violence, with its implication of death. Violence and death are omnipresent, especially in the series “Meurtres” [Murders] (1968), dealing with private dramas: self-destruction through suicide, the murdering of women, killings in apartments, on the stairs, in cars, on the streets. Several procedures reinforce this subject: a canvas with slits and splinters, glasses, mirrors, glass panes (often real ones applied onto the canvas), floors covered in bullet holes, often real bullets shot onto the piece of art, pictures with a crack, a tear that runs through them.” (Pierre Gaudibert. Monory, éditions Georges Fall, Bibli Opus. Paris, 1972.)
In Meurtre n° 1 [Murder no. 1], the image of a road in Havana, like a final memory of the world, is torn by the trajectory of a bullet; beyond it nothing is left but the dead space of a room with a tiled floor and neon light, and the fall.
(Jean-Christophe Bailly, Monory, Maeght éditeur, 1979)