Key Works

As a young artist, Kent Monkman experimented with abstraction, but he has become famous for representational works that draw on historic Western painting and contemporary popular culture to confront colonial realities. In addition to his mastery of medieval and Renaissance iconography, Monkman has a finely tuned understanding of the history of painting, particularly of the grand European works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his art, disparate sources converge and are recontextualized in relation to Indigeneity, sexuality, nationalism, and climate change, emphasizing that the allegories of the past are warnings for the future.