Art Basel Hong Kong

Team Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the 2017 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong. This marks our second appearance at the fair. We will present works by Parker Ito, Ryan McGinley and Tabor Robak. We will be located in booth 3C27. 

By Parker Ito, the most recent addition to the gallery’s roster, we will show works from a new series entitled Capitol Records Shit Toots. Each of these pieces shows a different floral arrangement in the foreground, while the background is always a view of Hollywood and its famous Capitol Records Tower. Ito produces this body by transferring laser toner prints of low-resolution photographs onto linen and then finishing the surfaces irregularly applying varnish. As a result of their idiosyncratic making, the Capitol Records works’ genre-status is mysterious: they belong neither to painting nor photography, though donning aspects of both. The gorgeous pictures continue the multimedia artist’s ongoing project of collecting, manipulating and re-framing images, a practice that deconstructs modes of pictorial presentation in the digital era.  

On view by Ryan McGinley will be two different manifestations of his studio portraiture practice. The artist’s more traditionally presented black-and-white photos, first exhibited in his 2010 exhibition at Team Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, represent the artist’s initial forêt into studio photography. With this body, he eschewed the bright colors and exuberant outdoor environments that had come to characterize his work, instead engaging with and building upon his medium’s most “classical” genre. YEARBOOK, which was debuted three years later and consists of overlapping vinyl prints of his models set against candy-colored backgrounds, retains a sense of the historical, but its vibrant palette and slick, almost commercial production and presentation give the work a radical Pop art quality.

Tabor Robak provides the booth with a brand-new three-channel work, entitled Colorwheel. As with most of his recent output, the piece’s pictorial content is generated live, via a custom-built computer. At the previous edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, we presented one of the earliest iterations from this period of the artist’s production, marked by a shift from looped animation to these durationally infinite works. Here, Robak’s ongoing interest in temporality and, more specifically, fleetingness is particularly explicit: the work uses the time of day to determine its parameters, so its imagery moves faster mid-day than during the night.

Each of these three artists represents a separate approach to artistic production in the digital era. Ito’s legendarily prolific practice is a reflection, examination and appraisal of the Internet’s visual culture, especially the difficulty of processing the deluge of images we encounter online. McGinley’s oeuvre, which pre-dates social media, is characterized by his subjects’ distinctly contemporary condition of camera-awareness – a generational characteristic facilitated by the relatively recent proliferation of digital cameras. Robak’s iteration of “digital art” perhaps takes the term most literally: the artist is forever chasing the vanguard of computer-generated imagery, seeking out the neoteric modes of artistic production made possible by technological innovations.  

Art Basel Hong Kong takes place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, located at 1 Harbour Road in the Wan Chai district. VIP openings occur on Tuesday, 21 March, from 3 to 8pm, and Wednesday, 22 March, from 1pm to 9pm. The fair is open to the public Thursday, 23 March, from 1pm to 8pm, Friday, 24 March, from 1pm to 9pm and Saturday, 25 March, from 11am to 6pm. For further information, please call the gallery at 212.279.9219.