Bob Monk, a Gagosian director who was with the gallery for more than 20 years, working closely with artists such as Ed Ruscha and Richard Artschwager, died on December 15 at 75. His ex-wife, Wendy Monk, said the cause was complications from a heart condition.
Monk was a quiet force of the New York art market, with a CV that included working for dealer Leo Castelli and Sotheby’s, to say little of the gallery that Monk himself cofounded. Across several decades, he established himself as a quiet force of the city’s market ecosystem.
Born in 1950, Monk grew up in Long Island, then moved with his family to Brooklyn. He attended Pratt Institute in New York, where he studied photography.
He started his career in the art market at Leo Castelli Gallery, where he began as an assistant before becoming director of prints at Castelli Graphics, a prints-focused operation, in 1978. “I went to art school as a practicing artist and fell into the Castelli Gallery,” Monk said in a 2015 oral history. “Leo became this incredible mentor to me, as did Ileana Sonnabend, whom I met, of course, through Leo.”
Through Castelli Graphics, he got to know stars of the era, including Robert Rauschenberg, whom Monk befriended. “If he could hug everyone in the world, he would,” Monk once said of Rauschenberg.
In 1985, Monk split off, founding his own SoHo gallery with Susan Lorence. That business, Lorence-Monk Gallery, showed artists such as Jasper Johns, Alan Saret, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Bruce Nauman, and David Hockney, and ran until 1992, when Monk joined Sotheby’s as the head of the contemporary prints department. In 1995, he was promoted to head of the contemporary art department.
By the late ’90s, Monk had joined Gagosian, where he liaised with Ruscha, a longtime friend who by then had joined the gallery’s roster. The two worked together on projects such as Ruscha’s 2022 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Monk also helped Artschwager, another Gagosian artist, in conceiving a set of elevators for the Whitney Museum prior to the artist’s death. Monk left Gagosian in 2024.
“I had the great pleasure of working with Bob alongside Ed Ruscha for a number of years,” Leta Garzan, a director at Gagosian, said in a statement to ARTnews. “Bob was always eager to share his decades of experience and he brought extraordinary dedication, generosity, and integrity to everything he did. His spirit and countless contributions to Gagosian will long be remembered.”
Monk is survived by his three children, Andrew, Spencer, and Julia, as well as by his grandchildren Lucy and Ellis.
