In 2019 I read an article about Jonathan Monk’s restaurant drawings in the German art magazine Monopol Magazin. The British artist draws on his restaurant receipts and sells those artworks for the price stated on the receipt, having the buyer eventually pay for his and his family’s restaurant meal. The restaurant drawings project has its own Instagram account, called monkpictures. Jonathan Monk’s restaurant drawings are inspired by artists like Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha or Donald Judd. The drawings are posted on Instagram randomly several times a month. In average approximately 600 out of his now almost 13000 followers write that they want to buy the work mostly with a short ‘Me’ in the comment field. Monk would never comment anything and until today it’s unclear who gets to buy the work in the end. Recently ‘buyer randomly selected’ has been added to every post. I was intrigued by his project and joined the group of interests. At the time in 2019 some of his receipts were also exhibited at Casey Kaplan gallery in New York. After several unanswered attempts to purchase a receipt I started a game with Jonathan Monk which I was lucky enough for him to join.

I started collecting my grocery shop receipts from a local shop called Meny. I camouflaged the last two letters to get a ‘Me’ referring to the most frequent comment on his posts. I printed, cut and edited some of Jonathan Monk’s works (most of them are appropriations in itself) and glued them on my grocery receipts. Every time there was a receipt posted on Instagram, I would add one of my works in my Instagram stories tagging his monkpictures account and offering him to trade one of his works for one of mine. I did that for several months without getting any reaction. Just before my wish to stop nagging & tagging him, I did one last post. I went out to shop for my own ‘monkpicture’. I bought products starting with the letters m, o, n, k, p, i, c, t, u, r, e, s and scanned them accordingly. I got a receipt where the initials of the purchased groceries read monkpictures vertically and decorated it with a picture of an appropriated Andy Warhol Mao by Jonathan Monk. That last receipt did it and I was contacted by the artist and sent one of his works. The receipt was from the day I shared my work with him and personalised for me with an Andy Warhol’s Campell can drawn onto it. What a game! Thank you JM!