Sculptor, print-maker and teacher born in London. He studied at Chelsea School of Art, 1958–61, and taught at Swindon School of Art, 1963–68, subsequently returning to Chelsea as a tutor. From the mid-1960s Monro made his mark with simplified, but easily readable, brightly coloured fibreglass sculptures. He had his first one-man exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery in 1968 and in the following year received an Arts Council Award. At the Arts Council’s 1969 Pop Art exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, he showed two works, a group of seven, 2.5m-high Reindeer (1966) and Money Bags (1966–67). Together with his friend, the painter Patrick Caulfield, Monro espoused the cause of perfectionist illustrative art. He also displayed overt antagonism to the hegemony of the St Martin’s group of sculptors. In 1972 he was commissioned by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation to produce a sculpture for Birmingham as part of the Arts Council’s ‘City Sculpture Project’. His response was a 5.5m-high, reinforced coloured fibreglass figure of the gorilla King Kong, which stood in the city’s Manzoni Gardens next to the Bull Ring shopping centre for four months, and was afterwards sold by the City Council. Nearly 50 years later, a new version was commissioned to coincide with the 2022 Commonwealth Games. With the original not available (it was sited in the private garden of its latest owner), the maquette was borrowed from the Wolverhampton Art Gallery and, under Monro’s supervision, a new, 7m-high version was made. The maquette had been shown at the Hayward Annual Exhibition of 1977, along with several other ambitious works by Monro, including the multi-figure groups, Latin American Formation Team (1972) and Waiters’ Race (1975). In 1981, Monro was commissioned by the architect Theo Crosby of Pentagram to provide fibreglass parapet figures representing the ‘Women of the World’ as part of his refurbishment of Unilever House. Originally intended as fourteen figures from seven models, it was ultimately decided to restrict the set to eight figures, comprising two of the Japanese model, and three each of the Nigerian and English (installed 1983). Although the 1930–32 Grade II façade was retained during the building’s 2004 redevelopment, Monro’s figures, as later additions, were removed, and their current whereabouts are not known. The Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum hold a number of Monro’s prints, and the Southampton Art Gallery has his life-size fibreglass group, Max Wall.
Bibliography: C. Aslet, ‘Fourteen Fine Figures by the River’, The Times, 6 April 1981, p. 5; D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; J. Fisher, ‘Britain’s King Kong: a history of Nicholas Monro’s King Kong, Sculpture Journal, vol. 26, no. 3 (2017), pp. 377–86; J. Murray, ‘King Kong statue returns to Birmingham for Commonwealth Games’, The Guardian, 22 July 2022; S. Nairne and N. Serota (eds.), British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century (Whitechapel Art Gallery exh. cat.), London, pp. 192–94, 258; G.T. Noszlopy, Public Sculpture of Birmingham (ed. J. Beach), Liverpool, 1998, pp. xx–xxi, 170, 200; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 278, 282, 471; Wikipedia: ‘King Kong statue’; J. Wood, ‘City Sculpture Project (1972) and Nicholas Monro’s King Kong’, Sculpture Journal, vol. 26, no. 3 (2017), pp. 373–76; J. Wood and L. Maby, ‘King Kong in context: Lesley Maby in conversation with Jon Wood’, Sculpture Journal, vol. 26, no. 3 (2017), pp. 387–90.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2003; revised, Terry Cavanagh, July 2024