Team is pleased to present a group exhibition organized by Miriam Katzeff. Forced Exposure will run from the 1st of July through the 30th of July 2010. The exhibition will include paintings, video and sculptures by Lutz Bacher, Tom Burr, Ross Knight, and Bjarne Melgaard. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.
This exhibition focuses on works of art that position the viewer as an interloper in the gallery. As technology encourages people to expose themselves to unknown audiences online, the idea of privacy has relaxed to reflect these developments. The works on view test whether this lack of boundaries extends into the physical world. While the artists in the exhibition do not have a strictly confessional style, the works force an immediate and awkward intimacy onto the viewer.
For over a decade, Lutz Bacher has produced an ongoing body of work entitled Do You Love Me? Interviewing curators, friends, and dealers about her life and her work, Bacher asks the questions but never appears on film. Using whatever technology was available, the seemingly casual interviews reveal more about the person answering the questions than the evasive artist. It is easy to imagine how Bacher’s relationship with the subjects must change as a result of uncomfortable revelations.
Using minimal forms and personal dedications, Tom Burr’s sculptures recreate private architectures as public stages. Through his transformation of domestic objects, Burr produces a sense of access to interrupted encounters. Black Wall Skirt simultaneously alludes to conceptual, physical and psychological spaces. The forms are loaded with possibilities of the fulfillment and failures of concealed desires.
Ross Knight’s formalist sculptures combine utilitarian materials with corporeal references to suggest secret rituals that are deliberately unresolved. In Void Fill, a cardboard box that is the height and width of an average man is punctured by a plastic bag filled with air. While Knight operates on his works with a reductive precision, the sculptures aspire to a precarious quality as though they were hastily abandoned in the gallery.
In Bjarne Melgaard’s most recent paintings, old pornographic magazines are defaced with crudely executed figures and scrawled texts from a continuous novel that relies on the violent mythology surrounding the artist. Like the rest of Melgaard’s work, the fragmented and diaristic qualities of the text lures the viewer into the artist’s constructed personas and manipulates the relationship between fact and fiction.
Tag: team Gallery
Pierre Bismuth
KRATOS
Team is pleased to present a group exhibition organized by the Zürich-based curator Raphael Gygax. KRATOS – ABOUT IL(LEGITIMATE)D POWER will run from the 27th of May through the 26th of June 2010. The exhibition will include works in a variety of mediums by five artists: Maja Bajević, Maria Eichhorn, Teresa Margolles, Gianni Motti and Artur Zmijewski. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.
This exhibition examines aspects of power and how they function within a broad social field. The selected artists all question the distribution, manifestation, and appropriation of power in so-called democratic systems, focusing on self-determination and artistic freedom. The work is often born from individual experience and activities that initially appear to be removed from the trajectories of cultural production and the art market.
Bosnian-French artist Maja Bajević (Bosnia-Herzegovina, b. 1967) presents a video entitled How do you want to be governed? In the video, Bajević frames a tense, yet unemotional female subject, while a male hand enters the frame and engages with her physically. Although his body remains invisible, his voice can be heard, asking the question “How do you want to be governed,” over and over. The woman’s face is alternately caressed and nudged by the hand, eliciting an anxiety over the threat of physical violence. The viewer is drawn into a psychological game in which the anticipation of violence initiates a discourse surrounding the abuse of power over the individual.
Maria Eichhorn (Germany, b. 1962) presents a series entitled Prohibited Imports, consisting of a re-photographed Robert Mapplethorpe catalogue after images of male genitalia were sanded away at a Japanese customs facility, where the book was seized as Eichhorn attempted to import it into that country. The photographs simultaneously obscure and heighten our concentration on what is no longer pictured. The performative intervention that Eichhorn facilitates maps out issues of censorship as it pertains to sexuality and freedom of expression, foregrounding the imposed moral codes of the Japanese officials. In this way, Mapplethorpe’s original project is intensified through the lens of a more contemporary socio-political endeavor.
As a volunteer at a Mexico City morgue, and a scholar of forensic medicine, Teresa Margolles (Mexico, b. 1963) mines corpses to critique the social injustice that exists even in death. Having witnessed the disappearance of the bodies of the underprivileged, and mass cremations of unidentified persons, Margolles began to create artworks that implicate this reality as symptomatic of a misguided value system. In this exhibition, Margolles expands upon these concerns with a selection of baroque jewelry, handmade from shattered glass extracted from the anonymous victims of drug related crimes, shot to death in their cars. Margolles will also present a photograph of the U.S. Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale from whose façade she had hung blood stained tarps. The fabrics are from an ongoing series in which the artist soaks up freshly spilled blood at drug-related murder scenes, afterwards installing them as flags or “paintings” in various locations.
Gianni Motti (Italy, b. 1958) uses ordinary events and the culture of spectacle in order to highlight human absurdity and frailty. In The Messenger, Motti turns his lens on Raël and Brigitte Boisselier, founders of the Raëlian Church and the Cloniad sect, religions of individualists who believe in extra terrestrials and clones, respectively. Motti’s staged events are often experienced through narrative and second-hand photography taken by on-lookers. His actions oscillate between rational and irrational, irony and provocation, rumor and misunderstanding.
Artur Zmijewski (Polish, b. 1966) creates films in a documentary style, often with ethical challenges and unpredictable outcomes, appearing as tests or improvisations with allegories of violence, victimization, power structures, and democratic/capitalist systems. For this exhibition the artist presents two single channel videos side by side in which a day in the life of two subjects, Yolanda in Mexico City, and Patricia in Berlin, are edited down to two 15 minute visual diaries – they work, sleep, and in between take their children to school, wash them, and clean their apartments. Shot in a reality television style, although not adhering to it’s familiar template of scrutinizing the rich and beautiful, or the more dramatically disenfranchised, Zmijewski’s films offer a glimpse into the lives of “everyday” citizens of democracy.
Gardar Eide Einarsson
ANOTHER MODERN MOMENT COMPLETED
Ryan McGinley @ Team Gallery
Banks Violette
Gladstone Gallery, in collaboration with Team Gallery, is pleased to announce a new installation by Banks Violette. Violette’s work ranges from haunting yet exquisitely rendered graphite drawings to sculptural installations composed of cast salt, light, and sound. Throughout his practice, he plumbs the simultaneous degradation and accretion of meaning through the process of mythology, often embodied in forms strongly associated with sub-cultural communities, personal memorials, or historical obscurities. The black and white spectacle of his stark compositions belies the uneasy and fraught allusions of appropriated images and forms reconstructed as vessels of oblivion.
For this new installation, Violette continues to mine a rich art historical terrain in which the materials and forms associated with Minimal and Conceptual Art become reactivated as theatrical platforms of performative decay. He pairs a large chandelier composed of multiple fluorescent tubes with a black wall that seems to buckle and melt against the reflection of the light. Both aspects of the installation recall the monochromatic tone and the use of replaceable industrial materials common to Minimalist and Conceptual sculptors such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin; however, Violette’s works seem self-consciously constructed and theatrical. Wires fall in a cascade alongside the chandelier while the apparatus of steel tubes and sandbags supporting the wall remain in plain sight. By exposing these more banal technical necessities, Violette heightens the artificial spectacle of his installation, as if willing these two canonical art historical movements into an internecine danse macabre. He unmasks form and content as sites vulnerable to intellectual vandalism and moribund mythologizing.
Banks Violette was born in 1973 and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including those at Museum Dhont-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium; Kunsthalle Wein; the Modern of Art Museum of Forth Worth, Texas; Kunsthalle Bergen, Norway; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has also participated in group exhibitions at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Royal Academy, London; P.S. 1, New York; the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; among others.
Gert & Uwe Tobias
Gert & Uwe Tobias
Come and See Before the Tourists Will Do – The Mystery of Transylvania
Team is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by the Köln-based brothers Gert & Uwe Tobias. Entitled Come and See Before the Tourists Will Do – The Mystery of Transylvania, the exhibition will run from the 11th of February through the 13th of March 2010. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.
To date, the biographical details surrounding Gert & Uwe Tobias have been used as an entry point to their sophisticated, ultra-stylized and, at times, darkly humorous installations, which, through their incorporation of wall painting, watercolors, collages, vitrines containing altered books, type-writer drawings, ceramic sculptures, and large-scale wood cut prints frequently approach the status of the gesamkunstwerk. The fact that they are identical twin brothers, for example, seems to provide an insight into the fact that their primary mode of production is that of printmaking and that these works are produced in hand-made editions of two – never exactly the same but always alike. Much has also been made of their birth in the region of Transylvania, Romania, as though this fact makes it appropriate that they began their careers with a body of work inspired by (among other things) low-budget vampire movies. This biographical data, however, only provides a cursory introduction to an artistic practice that encompasses an ever-widening range of influences and intentions.
The title of this show, Come and See Before the Tourists Will Do – The Mystery of Transylvania, was initially used by the Brothers in 2004 as an umbrella for a body of work that could have served to advertise horror films had those filmmakers commissioned neo-constructivists to promote their fictions. The Brothers chose from a list of titles of American and British films about vampires. These titles were then used as the inspiration for a group of sumptuously rendered, vividly colored wood block prints. These large-scale “posters” – at the same time conservative, modernist artworks and knowing commentaries on the commerce of art making – enjoyed a status as rarified art objects that culled from sources as far ranging as the Bauhaus, vintage fashion magazines, travel posters, and fabric designs. The Tobias Brothers’ vampire posters were, to put it mildly, virtuosic displays of historical knowledge. In 2009, Gert and Uwe decided to return to the series, this time focusing on European horror films, leaving their titles in the source languages. The results will line the walls of Team’s main gallery space.
The Tobias’ introspective and oblique woodcuts lovingly embrace eccentric figuration, geometric abstraction, and the typographic. Presented with them are a series of collages made from cutting and recombining books and other printed matter. These collage/sculptures are shown inside two large-scale vitrines that occupy the center of the space, while Team’s second gallery will contain the “exhibition woodcut.” For each of their solos, the Brothers create a print that functions both as an autonomous artwork and as a promotional tool for the show itself. Surrounding this piece will be a number of drawings made by Gert and Uwe using typewriters and white sheets of paper.
The Tobias’ interest in folklore and regional mythologies provides a contextual framework for their exhibitions. Personal biography, cultural identity, and popular culture all play a role in their creation of an open ended visual dialect. They borrow freely from art historical and other cultural milieus in order to construct a fragmented array of material tropes, which are then subsumed into a whole through a precisely considered exhibition schema.
The Tobias Brothers have had solo exhibitions in the US at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Additionally, solo shows have been mounted by the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway, the Kunstverein in Heilbronn, the Kunsthalle Wien, and the Franz Gertsch Museum in Switzerland. This is their second solo at Team.
Stanley Whitney @ Team Gallery
Team is pleased to present a show of new paintings by Stanley Whitney.
Like a correspondent in the standardized Western mode, Stanley Whitney approaches the blank page of the canvas and begins to write his sentences, word by word, from the top left corner, concluding at the bottom right. His words, blocks of vibrant color, are laid side by side – individual utterances, following one upon the other, creating full thoughts; saturated statements of luminosity. The artist’s process continues until the paintings are so loaded that they threaten to explode. In his view, the paintings succeed when, despite their scale, they become so crowded that it appears as though a single wall could not contain them.
These paintings are as much written as they are constructed, moving the viewer’s eye across the paintings – laterally first, vertically second – never allowing that eye to rest in one place for too long. In these paintings, colors are not only butted up against each other – at one moment seemingly contained by the horizontal bands, at other times careening off the edges of the canvas – colors also lurk behind colors, sometimes bleeding into each other.
Whitney’s work presents real, tangible, visible relationships – of the brush to the canvas, of the artist to his labor, of the artist to a world-view, and of the artist to the visual sign of his authorship; nothing is occluded, everything is out there. The paintings are what they are but their potent impact, their sensuousness, their attractiveness, remains nevertheless mysterious. It is possible that Whitney’s greatest accomplishment – and he pulls it off in every painting – is that these effortless paintings posses such severe conviction. In Whitney’s work, daily labor becomes something akin to spiritual practice.
The modules of painted color can be seen either as paintings within the paintings or as building blocks used in the construction of the picture’s façade. Once the idea of an architectonic reading is placed in the mind of the viewer, it seems impossible afterward to ignore it. Windows, piled on top of windows, create ramshackle tenements of light.
Whitney has been exhibiting his work since 1970. In those forty years he has never wavered from his intense commitment to a rigorous and reduced manifesto of abstraction with limitless possibilities. Both minimal and expressive, dryly conceptual and jazzed-up, Whitney’s pictures house equal parts intelligence, history, and reckless abandon.
Stanley Whitney
Team is pleased to present a show of new paintings by Stanley Whitney. The exhibition will run from the 7th of January through the 6th of February 2010. The gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.
Like a correspondent in the standardized Western mode, Stanley Whitney approaches the blank page of the canvas and begins to write his sentences, word by word, from the top left corner, concluding at the bottom right. His words, blocks of vibrant color, are laid side by side – individual utterances, following one upon the other, creating full thoughts; saturated statements of luminosity. The artist’s process continues until the paintings are so loaded that they threaten to explode. In his view, the paintings succeed when, despite their scale, they become so crowded that it appears as though a single wall could not contain them.
These paintings are as much written as they are constructed, moving the viewer’s eye across the paintings – laterally first, vertically second – never allowing that eye to rest in one place for too long. In these paintings, colors are not only butted up against each other – at one moment seemingly contained by the horizontal bands, at other times careening off the edges of the canvas – colors also lurk behind colors, sometimes bleeding into each other.
Whitney’s work presents real, tangible, visible relationships – of the brush to the canvas, of the artist to his labor, of the artist to a world-view, and of the artist to the visual sign of his authorship; nothing is occluded, everything is out there. The paintings are what they are but their potent impact, their sensuousness, their attractiveness, remains nevertheless mysterious. It is possible that Whitney’s greatest accomplishment – and he pulls it off in every painting – is that these effortless paintings posses such severe conviction. In Whitney’s work, daily labor becomes something akin to spiritual practice.
The modules of painted color can be seen either as paintings within the paintings or as building blocks used in the construction of the picture’s façade. Once the idea of an architectonic reading is placed in the mind of the viewer, it seems impossible afterward to ignore it. Windows, piled on top of windows, create ramshackle tenements of light.
Whitney has been exhibiting his work since 1970. In those forty years he has never wavered from his intense commitment to a rigorous and reduced manifesto of abstraction with limitless possibilities. Both minimal and expressive, dryly conceptual and jazzed-up, Whitney’s pictures house equal parts intelligence, history, and reckless abandon.