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Team is pleased to announce our participation in the 46th edition of Art Basel. This marks the gallery’s tenth appearance at Art Basel.
We will be located in Hall 2.1, Booth S15. Our presentation this year will include works by Cory Arcangel, Alex Bag, Andrew Gbur, Ryan McGinley and Tabor Robak. While these artists span a wide variety of media, they find a common thread in their interest in the deconstruction of temporality – in particular, its manifestations in popular culture and commercial media.
By Cory Arcangel, we will show works from his Screenagers, Tallboys and Whales? series. These pieces consist of foam pool noodles, anthropomorphized via store-bought accouterments. The sculptures evoke art history – including John McCracken, Cady Noland and André Cadere – but remain solidly grounded in the contemporary. Each of the items is charged with modern cultural associations, highlighting our tendency to generate and comprehend identity superficially, through branding and other consumer choices.
On display by Alex Bag will be her seminal Fall ’95. The video consists of a documentation of a fictionalized art school student, portrayed by Bag herself. Presciently employing the then-novel format of the video diary – now, in the era of YouTube, a culturally saturated and dominant mode of quotidian self-expression – the parodic work skewers New York City’s art world through the lens of a young woman artist, addressing the market, masculine power structures and educational systems, all the while retaining an apparent light-hearted humorousness.
Andrew Gbur’s face paintings follow in the footsteps of Andy Warhol, finding their genesis in imagining the underpainting of his screen-printed portraits. While their color palettes vary dramatically, each work in this series uses roughly the same forms to portray the human visage: crescents for the mouth, a triangle for the nose, ragged almond shapes for eyes. The serial nature of these paintings endows the “smiley faces” – an oversaturated symbol of pleasantness – with a leering quality, thus undermining our typical reading of an innocuous pop cultural motif, underlining the fluidity of visual language.
New road trip photographs by Ryan McGinley portray nudes, devoid of contemporary cultural identifiers, in autumnal landscapes. The artist’s hyper-mediation of his surfaces – his trademark treatment of photographic grain and digital manipulation of color – lends a distinct modernity to his amaranthine subject matter. McGinley’s voracious consumption and digestion of visual information – taking from contemporary culture as well as the histories of photography and painting – is manifest in these endlessly allusive works; although entrenched in their identifiable influences, McGinley’s photographs are transcendent, unfamiliar, utterly his own.
A moving-image work by Tabor Robak uses the relatively new technology of transparent television monitors to display CGI imagery over multiple channels as well as layers. The aforementioned screens are placed in front of regular LED TV’s, giving the work a perceptually challenging multi-dimensionality. The artist takes technology as both subject and medium – specifically, the ways in which consumer technology informs our modes of seeing, creating and necessitating new ways of receiving visual information.
