_email_129_0.jpg)
Team Gallery will participate in 48th annual edition of Art Basel. This marks our twelfth appearance at the fair. We will again be located at booth S14.
This year, Team will present a tight hang of four American gallery artists, two of whom will be showing in Switzerland for the first time.
Parker Ito will be represented by three paintings: two come from his 2016 series Capitol Records Shit Toots, while the third is a gigantic, truncated self-portrait entitled Neck with Red Sweater. The latter appears to be an effortless, mediated and printed image that reveals itself upon close inspection to be a painstakingly rendered, hand-painted oil. The former series finds its genesis in the artist’s quotidian practice of bringing flowers home and arranging them before a panorama of Los Angeles. The battle central in Ito’s work – between the banal and the tenets of fine art – can be seen in the give-and-take between the cell-phone aesthetic of his imagery and the legion of masterful practitioners whom the artist holds in thrall.
Ryan McGinley will be showing work from a recent body of photographs taken in upstate New York. The work is a continuation of his Fall/Winter series but also marks a somewhat dramatic departure. The normally lithe, naked bodies that have peopled his landscapes in the past have been replaced with corpulent figures whose bodies are oftentimes posed in languid recline. The transformative light, due to the fact the images are captured during the magic hour between daylight and evening, imbue the subjects with an ethereal grandeur.
Sam McKinniss, a Brooklyn-based artist whose 2016 Team debut was a dramatic success, will show six oil paintings. Although each picture displays a strong autonomous value, the conflation of subjects lends to McKinniss’ project a certain seductive morbidity. Pastiches of two flower paintings by Fantin-Latour inform two portraits of celebrities: one, Michael Jackson, appears as a ghostly presence; the other, Lorde, painted by McKinniss for her most recent album cover, reclines invitingly on a bed bathed in violet light. The final two paintings – of a dog and a bird blissfully coexisting, and of a corpse from the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide – further problematize our spectatorship and the desire for beauty, the famous and their corruption and downfall.
Tabor Robak will be showing five generative works from his Quantaspectra series. Over the course of the past year, Robak has turned all of his energies into programming and creating a group of computer works which concern themselves with particular colors and the narrative associations and thematic signatures usually ascribed to them. Among the works on view at Basel are Parasec Melt – a slowly evolving, contemplative animation of purple, planetary vistas; TabCorp – a money-laden, toxic-orange mash-up of workplaces; and xHow – a work whose vertiginous quality comes from the rapidly spinning data crunching of 760 illustrations of everyday life. Robak’s new works are constantly evolving portals, melding representation and abstraction while providing access to the transcendental for viewers who spend their lives gazing at light-emitting glass screens.
The fair is open to the public from Thursday, 15 June through Sunday, 18 June. Fair hours are 11am to 7pm. Additionally, there are two private days during which admission is by invitation only. These days are Tuesday, 13 June and Wednesday, 14 June.
