Art Basel Miami Beach - Art Galleries 2015

Team Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the 2015 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. This marks our eleventh appearance at the fair. Our presentation includes works by Cory Arcangel, Alex Bag, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Andrew Gbur, Robert Janitz, Sam McKinniss, Suzanne McClelland, Ryan McGinley, Tam Ochiai, Tabor Robak and Stanley Whitney. We will again be located in booth G08. 

By Cory Arcangel, we are showing the first multiple-panel work from his Photoshop Gradient series. With the growing prominence of this body of work comes the artist’s ever-increasing concern with their vaunted status as unique art objects. By fabricating and framing an easily reproducible Photoshop technique as one would a more traditional photograph, Arcangel interrogates the prestige and conservatory regard we endow to Fine Art. In creating a triptych, he pushes this notion further, employing a presentational trope most often associated with the venerated medium of painting.

In conjunction with Alex Bag’s solo show at ICA Miami, we are showing her 1996 video work His Girlfriend is a Robot. In this piece, Bag employs her typically sardonic wit to skewer depictions of gender and beauty within popular media, creating a fake TV show about a dislikable male character who cannot get a girlfriend and so purchases a robot instead. Additionally, Bag’s Untitled Project for the Andy Warhol Museum – the first work by an outside artist commissioned by that institution – will be included in Art Basel Miami Beach’s Film Sector.

Following his September exhibition at our New York gallery, Gardar Eide Einarsson offers one of his counterfeit stamp paintings. These works are recent products from the artist’s always appropriative-practice: he has taken images of “Forever” stamps from the United States Postal Service’s website, which the governmental institution has visually redacted in order to prevent counterfeiting. The resultant images appear to evince a totalitarian message: a strikethrough cancels out the still-legible word “forever” underneath such headings as “Justice,” “Liberty,” and “Freedom.” Einarsson’s artwork, through usurpation and isolation of already existing formal material, provides a critique of the structures of control and violence that permeate American media.

In advance of an upcoming exhibition taking place at both of Team’s New York spaces, Andrew Gbur provides two large scale paintings, one depicting a transmogrified Fox Films logo (reading 30th Century Fox), the other a pair of pants, imperceptibly appropriated from a Beck album cover. Each work employs a limited palette of just two shades, and reduces all detail to blocks of opaque color. Openly annexing the techniques and aesthetics of the likes of Warhol, Ruscha, and Palermo, Gbur interrogates the dishonesty of signage, commercial or otherwise, and the impossibility of perfection in any hand-made form.

Paintings by Robert Janitz exist within the wide margin separating abstraction from representation. Thick, workman-like brushstrokes overlay a monochromatic underpainting. There is a familiar resonance to the physicality of his gestures; bringing to mind the acts of buttering bread, or washing a window. By leaving layers open and corners unfinished, Janitz foregrounds the picture plane and the medium of painting, while also endowing the works with an ironic grandeur. Also on view are Janitz’ so-called “reverse portraits,” small works that investigate the viewer’s role in image-making, and specifically the transformation – or confabulation – of abstract marks into an identifiable picture.

Sam McKinniss, the most recent addition to the gallery’s roster, offers representational paintings that probe the intersection of lust, darkness and death in popular media. His source material ranges widely, from his own cell phone snaps, to film stills, to paparazzi photos of celebrities, to French Baroque and Rococo painting. The referent images are chosen with equal measures of intuition and careful consideration for their unexpected implications of sexuality and threat, the closely tied feelings of fear and attraction that we lend to the mysterious and unknown.

Ryan McGinley, whose Winter and Fall exhibitions currently hang at our 83 Grand Street and 306 Windward Avenue spaces, respectively, presents examples of these two new bodies of work, which he created in Upstate New York during the eponymous seasons. This arrangement constitutes a reversal of axes for Ryan’s “road trip” practice: while, in the past, he has shot primarily during the summer months, while varying locations across the United States, here he shot within a finite geography and allowed the seasons to provide visual variation, instead of the terrain. He has flipped the constant and the variable, so the exploratory act shifts from the plane of space to the plane of time.

By Suzanne McClelland, who is included in the exhibition No Man’s Land on view at the Rubell Family Collection, we are presenting new examples from her Domestic Terrorist body of work.  These paintings mine controversial source material, taking descriptive data from FBI wanted posters for American domestic terrorists. By giving physical presence to this particular written information, these pieces seek to bridge or occupy a semiotic gap that exists between the text which provide an incomplete picture of a missing person, and the actual individual and their ideologically motivated actions.

By Tam Ochiai, we are showing examples from his Everyone Has Two Places body of paintings, each of which take two cities’ names as subject. These nominative “places” are the birth- and death-sites of a variety of historical figures: Nick Drake, Al Capone, Johnny Thunders. The formally divergent canvases explore the idea that travel between two locales might serve as a poetic index for a life lived. 

Tabor Robak presents the two-channel work Dog Park, which is powered by dedicated, custom-built computers. The artist has been increasingly drawn to the potential of the infinite in digital artwork; the imagery in this work changes constantly, determined by random choices within a complex set of fixed parameters, programmed by the artist. The video, which depicts a fantastical, undulating computer motherboard riddled with tiny flitting birds, is therefore inexhaustibly durational, never repeating itself.

In the wake of his much-lauded exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Stanley Whitney provides a large scale painting in his decades-old compositional modus operandi: gridded blocks of color on a square canvas, separated by thin ribbons of pigment. Within this rigid approach, the artist finds a wealth of possibility, each peripatetic shade perpetually recurring as the eye moves up and down, left to right, always appearing new, altered by its neighbors.

VIP openings for Art Basel Miami Beach will take place on Wednesday, 02 December, from 10am-8pm, and Thursday, 03 December, from 11am-8pm. The fair is open to the public Friday through Sunday, noon-8pm.

For further information/images, please call 212.279.9219.