Team is pleased to present a show of new paintings, along with a new film, by Muntean/Rosenblum. The exhibition will run from the 15th of February through the 24th of March 2007. The gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.
“Today, there is no area of language exterior to bourgeois ideology: our language comes from it, returns to it, remains locked within it. The only possible answer is neither confrontation nor destruction but only theft: to fragment the old texts of culture, of science, of literature, and to disseminate and disguise the fragments in the same way that we disguise stolen merchandise.” (Ihab Hassan)
Like ransom notes sent to the Academy, the paintings of Muntean/Rosenblum pilfer text and image fragments and place them in dilapidated landscapes rife with balletically posed youths—a new Romanticism for a consumption-obsessed world; a poetic angle on the coming apocalypse. A carefully considered form of bricolage, their paintings fuse contemporary, transient concerns with somber introspection—trend-spotting with gravitas.
From the world of commercial imagery—teen magazines and lifestyle rags—the couple voraciously select, masticate and expunge images. The personages in their paintings come from any number of figures—an arm from here, a head from there. The personages are constructed and fused together in much the same way as the text fragments that act as didactic plates for the paintings.
In their films, Muntean/Rosenblum reanimate, to a degree, the melancholic worlds of their paintings. Returning these exquisite corpses from the form of painting, where they are estranged, to the world of the moving image where they are somehow more at home.
Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum have been working collaboratively since 1992. Monographic museum exhibitions have included the Tate Britain, the MUSAC in Leon, the Kunsthalle in Budapest, the Kunstverein in Salzburg, Switzerland’s Kunsthaus Glarus, Amsterdam’s De Appel Foundation, the Vienna SECESSION as well as many others. Gallery exhibitions are also numerous, including solos in Tel Aviv, Paris, Chicago, Seoul, Berlin, Barcelona, San Francisco, London, Turin and Zurich.
This is Muntean/Rosenblum’s first solo show at Team and their first one-person show in New York in seven years. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs, please call 212.279.9219.
