ARCO

Team Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the 2016 edition of ARCO in Madrid. We will present a two-person booth of brand-new works by Cory Arcangel and Stanley Whitney. We will be located in booth 7A12.

By Arcangel, we will show a new example from his Photoshop Gradient series, as well as a triptych of color pen-plotter drawings, works he creates by programming an outdated architectural drafting device to mechanically generate pencil drawings. Both bodies of work galvanize increasingly dated technology to debunk the mythologies that surround artistic production. For the Gradients, Arcangel produces an image by selecting the eponymous color demonstration tool in Photoshop and clicking once or twice; the resultant high-resolution file is then sent to a photo lab for printing and framing. On one hand, the works mischievously challenge their own status as unique art objects – their titles provide explicit and detailed instructions for their making – while on another, they serve as gorgeous explorations of photographic color devoid of contrast, contour and shadow. Additionally on display will be a sculpture from his new body of work, entitled Dump Bin, which consists of a sleek metal commercial display case filled with DVDs – a recently obsolete format – of soon-to-be forgotten films.

A brand new painting by Whitney will hang alongside smaller gouache works. The artist’s now-iconic compositional approach consists of gridding squares of color and sectioning them off with horizontal ribbons. In these works, color is merged with structure, pairing the medium down to those two essential qualities. This rubric combines tenants of unlikely bedfellows in Minimalism and Expressionism, establishing his rigidly repetitious form as a means to explore the emotive possibilities of intuitively applied color. The gouache works, by contrast, are characterized by their use of empty space and lines, self-reflexively imitating the layout of his canvas works while emphasizing mark making and a translucent materiality, rather than volume, weight and opacity.  

While the pairing of these two major artists, staunchly divergent in generation and media, might seem initially unlikely, their distinct work participates easily in aesthetic and intellectual conversation. They share the ostensible subject matter of color, as well as a loose-fitting stylistic rigor and an academic concern for the generative power of visual repetition. Arcangel, while producing these particular pieces, engaged directly with Whitney’s practice; the Gradient’s scale is matched identically to that of the large painting, while the colorful plotter drawings were made in response to the gouaches.

The 36-year old Cory Arcangel has been the subject of numerous international monographic exhibitions at both galleries and major museums, including The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, The Whitney Museum in New York, The Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, The Barbican in London and MoCA in Miami. His work is included in many public collections, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, MoMA in New York, The Tate in London, Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington D.C. and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich.

Stanley Whitney was born in 1946 and has been exhibiting his work since 1970. Most recently, he was the subject of a rapturously-received solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The show was reviewed by, among others, Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, Roberta Smith in the New York Times, Peter Plagens in the Wall Street Journal and David Frankel in Artforum.

ARCO is located in Halls 7 and 9 at Feria de Madrid. VIP openings take place on Wednesday, 24 February and Thursday, 25 February, from noon to 8pm. The fair is open to the public 26 – 28 February, from noon to 8pm.

For further information, please call 212-279-9219.