Art Basel Miami Beach | Art Galleries 2016

Team Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the 2016 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. This marks our twelfth appearance at the fair. Our presentation includes works by Cory Arcangel, Carina Brandes, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Robert Janitz, Ross Knight, Jo Nigoghossian, David Ratcliff, Sam Samore, Banks Violette and Stanley Whitney. We will again be located in booth G08.

By Cory Arcangel, we will show an early example from his Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations series. The artist uses the eponymous “gradient” tool found in Adobe’s Photoshop software to create abstract photographic images of blended color, which he then produces as unique framed c-prints. These visually striking works are both humorous and conceptually rigorous, isolating and interrogating the crucial role of context and presentation in the contemporary era. Since their unveiling in a 2008 solo show at Team, the Gradients have been exhibited prominently in numerous institutional shows.

Carina Brandes contributes a selection of black-and-white photographs that seem to exist outside of time, devoid of any cultural or technological temporal signifiers. Her subjects, which are usually animals and nude young women, engage in inscrutably liturgical performances. The geographic and psychological seclusion of the depicted actions endows the pictures with a voyeuristic pleasure, inviting the viewer to a fantastical but fully realized world that is mysterious, meticulous and distinctly female. 

By Gardar Eide Einarsson, we will display a new figurative painting, rendered in the artist’s characteristically opaque black and white, an example from the his ongoing series of works that sample their content from book covers. Entitled Teenagers and the Law, after the book from which it takes its imagery, the piece depicts three ambiguous figures, each wearing an eerily blank expression. The picture itself is both haunting and alluring, while the context of its origin endows it with a set of radical politics, pointing to the dehumanizing nature of neoliberal power structures.

A 2012 painting by Robert Janitz subverts one of his highly recognizable, repeated compositions. For several years, the artist has been producing works that feature oil and cold-wax medium, mixed with flour and brushed in wide vertical swaths over still-visible monochromatic underpainting. In this earlier piece, the blue brushstrokes are opaque and horizontally oriented, the bottom layer of yellow pigment of color only visible near the canvas’ edges.

By Ross Knight, we will show several intimately scaled sculptures. With these works, the artist evokes both the human body and man-made mechanical objects, exploring the frictional territory between the animal and the artificial. While past works have been characterized by splashes of bright color and grandiose scale, these pieces are small, and their palette is confined to pale pinks, yellows and bone-like neutrals. Formally, Knight invokes Minimalism and Futurism, but buries these references in his own bawdy and idiosyncratic sculptural vocabulary.

New paintings by Suzanne McClelland use language to forge unorthodox portraits of the world’s highest-paid rappers. Text is a cohering element in McClelland’s work, appearing in all her paintings – albeit with varying degrees of legibility. The artist treats handwriting as a mode of drawing, an alternate means to make a picture: frequently, the works use written words and numbers to depict an invisible subject – an emotion, a missing person, an individual’s net worth. 

By Ryan McGinley, we will show Dan Dusted, an iconic work from 2002. The photo – which depicts McGinley’s close friend, the painter Dan Colen – comes from his series The Kids Are Alright, which catapulted the artist to fame and earned him a solo show at the Whitney at age 25. The vérité images, which continue the legacy of subculture-photography forged by the likes of Roberta Bayley, David Wojnarowicz and Nan Goldin, capture the exploits of the artist’s social circle, members of an outlaw creative community based in New York City’s Lower East Side. These pictures, whose subjects include graffiti, drug use and unbridled sexuality, are charged with a specific sense of youth – one rife with inseparably intertwined joy and heartbreak. An edition of this photograph is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum and was recently included in their exhibition Human Interest: Portraits From The Whitney’s Collection. 

This year’s stand will mark the debut appearance of Jo Nigoghossian with Team Gallery. She will be represented by a significantly scaled sculpture comprised of welded steel, rubber and neon light. The works’ erratic, gestural shapes seem to undermine the materials’ integrity, more formally reminiscent of Expressionist painting than Process sculpture – but simultaneously employing the latter’s aesthetic of rigorous austerity.

A new series of collages by David Ratcliff overlay text from comic books onto images from old nature magazines. These works pair disparate surrogates for nostalgia – the National Geographic-style images suggest saccharine warmth and passive escapism, while the superhero inscriptions are active, aggressive and youthful. These conflicting visual languages simultaneously compromise and enhance one another, amplifying and undermining their differing romantic visions.

By Sam Samore, we will present examples a historic body of his work from 1973. The Murdered Brother centers on an inflated rubber glove, choreographed by the artist into a variety of positions in a suburban home, each suggestive of a different crime scene. As in much of his work, Samore conveys the existence of a narrative, here employing Hollywood tropes of crime fiction – which he merges with the Conceptualist conventions of artist performance and deadpan documentation to create images that are darkly funny and deeply self-reflexive. 

A new graphite drawing by Banks Violette explores the roles of social rebellion and violence in contemporary society. The work consists of the words “legalize crime,” drawn in an all-caps, sans-serif font – drawing attention to the tendency of capitalism to suppress and stigmatize behaviors detrimental to itself. 

We will show a new work by Stanley Whitney, who has spent the majority of his career exploring the possibilities of a single compositional strategy: since the 1980s, the artist has cobbled his paintings from blocks of brilliant color, assembled in horizontal rows, and separated by thin bands of pigment. Within the rigorous system of his chosen strategy, he’s developed methods to engage with the primary issues of abstract painting, focusing on gesture, light, gravity, and color. Whitney is an accomplished colorist – there’s a temptation to understand his work in the legacy of Color Field Painting – but his methods are different from those of his forebears. Instead of using color to render forms, Whitney uses color as form, exploiting the type of space generated by jarring color relationships.

VIP openings for Art Basel Miami Beach will take place on Wednesday, 30 November, from 10am to 4pm, and Thursday, 01 December, from 11am to 3pm. The fair will be open to the public on Thursday from 3 to 8pm, Friday from noon to 8pm, Saturday from noon to 8pm and Sunday from noon to 6pm. For further information, please call 212.279.9219.