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Team is pleased to announce our participation in Art | 44 | Basel | Art Galleries. We will be located in Hall 2.1, Booth P11.
Team Gallery’s earliest reputation was built (somewhat erroneously) on the idea that the gallery exclusively exhibited black and white artwork. This public perception originated with the prominent visibility of a few artists within the program who refused to work with color, namely Gardar Eide Einarsson, Steven Parrino and Banks Violette. In the years that followed, the gallery developed through the addition of artists who employ color, sometimes aggressively, such as Cory Arcangel, Ryan McGinley, Gert & Uwe Tobias and Andreas Schulze.
For the 44th edition of Art Basel, Team will embrace its original public persona. The stand features a large black powder-coated steel barrier by Banks Violette, as well as graphic black and white paintings by Gardar Eide Einarsson. In addition to these works, which are consistent with these artists’ colorless mode of production, the gallery will present black and white works made by several of our newer artists who, in certain cases, typically make polychrome pieces.
Two 25 foot-wide vinyls by Belgian artist Pierre Bismuth span the walls of the stand. The titles of these pieces reveal Bismuth’s process and visual language: the black marker drawings are a linear representation of the artist following the right hand of filmed subjects, in this case Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Against the backdrop of these pieces, artworks by other gallery artists will be presented. Bismuth will also show framed pieces from his Following the Right Hand Of… series, here featuring a photograph of his actress subjects beneath a layer of Plexiglas upon which he’s drawn the movement of their right hand throughout the duration of a feature film.
From Sam Samore, who has recently been experimenting with vivid color studies of women’s lips and eyes, we are exhibiting three black and white gelatin silver print photographs from his 1973 series Murdered Brother. The series features a white glove, placed in various absurd positions, the sole remnant of an otherwise unseen victim of murder. Continuing his experimentation within his Photoshop Gradient series, Cory Arcangel will contribute a new piece in grayscale. As opposed to his previous color gradients, typically made in Photoshop with one click of the mouse, his work for Basel was made with two mouse-clicks, creating two layers of gradation. Stanley Whitney, known for his paintings — balanced compositions of bold squares of color — will be represented here by graphite drawings. Without color, Whitney uses line and density to create variety among the squares that compose the grid structures in these drawings.
Ryan McGinley, expanding on a series of black and white studio portraits he began making in 2010, has made six new portraits for this presentation. Although these photographs have an air of spontaneity, they are actually the product of a meticulous studio practice in which McGinley takes hundreds of pictures of every sitter; each session eventually edited down to the one defining image of each subject. This body of work, in particular, focuses on McGinley’s interpretation of “the classical”. The gallery will also exhibit black and white photographs by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, documentation of a series of performances entitled Veterans, that have occurred all over Europe and most recently at Team Gallery in New York. The performance features a veteran of military conflict standing facing the corner of the wall, an act that signifies shame, contrition, and protest.
In 1998, Alex Bag made an adaptation of the Joan Crawford vehicle Harriet Craig. The film centers on the title character’s neurotically perfectionist attitude towards her home and family. Ultimately, her neuroses alienate her from those closest, leaving her alone in her tomb-like suburban home. Bag’s reenactment of the film compresses the original down to a taut 12 minutes. The stand will feature six Polaroid self-portraits Bag took while filming this piece, transformed into the film’s leading actress.
Stacks of Jakob Kolding’s commercial grade posters, free for the taking, use advertising strategies to simultaneously laud and criticize the development of urban space. These pieces will be placed on the floor, and round out the booth. Kolding has been making posters throughout his career. Organized in stacks, these unlimited series of prints take on a sculptural presence and allude to the architecture and planning of urban block housing, especially from the communist era.
This year’s stand will mark the debut appearance of Daniel Turner with Team Gallery. Known for pathos-loaded spatial interventions, Turner will be represented by an example from his ongoing 5150 series. Culling a material from a past job as a roofer in Virginia, Turner fills a vinyl casing with the industry’s viscous bitumen, then convolutes the surface over a trio of wooden supports. The final object mutually belies its outside — a hard-shelled flawless form — and its entombed liquid interior which will never solidify.
This presentation plays with the early aughts misconception that Team Gallery only exhibits black and white work, while simultaneously representing the gallery’s focus: exhibiting distinctive and often idiosyncratic work positioned at the intersection of minimalism, conceptualism and contemporary trends from the counter-culture.
