Mönch is a life-sized matte-black polyester figure dressed in a rough Franciscan habit, with a cowled robe and a rope cintura knotted three times. The figure stands slightly hunched with closed eyes and arms at its sides, absorbing light and returning almost none. Placement after Bruce Nauman's neon text wall creates a sharp contrast, producing a man-shaped void that both arrests and repels the viewer's gaze. The sculpture's uncanny stillness and closed eyes provoke lingering mental images and associations with mute, blinded monastic figures. Nathan Ballingrud's Wounds contains similar mute monks called the Order of the Black Iron, functioning as Hell's cartographers, which echoes those associations.
Mönch (Monk) is a solid polyester figure, life-sized and jarringly lifelike in its details, depicting a somewhat gaunt man dressed in roughly Franciscan habit: a floor-length cowled robe, a rope cintura with three knots around his midsection. He hunches ever so slightly forward but otherwise is just standing, with his arms loose at his sides. His eyes are closed. From head to toe he is a perfect matte black; he drinks the light and returns virtually none of it.
In a circuit of the Glenstone Museum's Iconoclasts exhibit, Mönch, by the German artist Katharina Fritsch, comes a short walk after a visitor passes Bruce Nauman's Good Boy Bad Boy, an entire wall of short English phrases (e.g. I AM ALIVE / YOU ARE ALIVE / WE ARE ALIVE / THIS IS YOUR LIFE) in blinking neon lights arrayed in a wild variety of colors.
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