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31/10/2012

Chris Vasell - Muntean/Rosenblum

Team Gallery, New York

Team Gallery is pleased to present a show of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Chris Vasell. The exhibition will run from 01 November through 21 December 2012. The gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene. Concurrently, our 47 Wooster Street space will house an installation by Vienna-based artists Muntean/Rosenblum.

Variations on 14 Yellow Teeth is a new body of work that showcases Chris Vasell’s eccentric approach to abstraction. The title refers to fourteen blocks of brushy, canary yellow arranged as if inside a gaping mouth in an untitled 1988 painting by Albert Oehlen. Taking this pictorial structure as a starting point, Vasell has fashioned paintings that are made up of disparate elements collaged onto stained canvases.

For this exhibition, Vasell has affixed found bits of differently colored cloth, felt, foil, paper, and other commonplace materials to stained canvas. Without using the traditional paint-and-brush method, Vasell’s paintings are arrangements of line, color, and composition onto a surface in which shapes and materials rest. In the past, the artist has described his process of collage as Japanese Rock Gardening cum Serial-Killer-Spending-Time-With-The-Body. In a fluid process of collection and free association, he allows one piece to generate the next in an unreserved and cornucopian fashion.

The canvases to which the pieces are affixed are stained with faint, psychedelic washes of pale pink, acid blue, and sea green acrylic. The atmospheric quality of the coloring offers a smudgy, irregular rhythm to which the collaged pieces are set — something like the Los Angeles sky, with diffuse, low-hanging smog. Each work seems to consider the task of integrating these antithetical sensibilities, toying with their contradictions and possibilities. The backgrounds recall the expressionistic mid-century “soak stain” technique — oil paint with the washy look of watercolor — while the surface orchestration recalls the prime color paper cut-outs of Matisse’s late collages — the “painting with scissors” method.

Neon pinks and greens, bright yellows and ruby reds stand out among the collaged fabrics and scraps. Most of the recognizable elements in the new paintings are sartorial: the leg of a tube sock, the elastic waistband from a pair of briefs, the lining of a hotel slipper, the wide halo of a crew neck t-shirt. The materials have a corporeal feel, alongside the tangible sense that they have been worn or used and are being reverently recycled, like a sophisticated art historical gesture spun into the logic of the canvases.

This is Vasell’s second solo exhibition at Team Gallery. The artist has had numerous shows in galleries in both the U.S. and abroad. His paintings have also been exhibited in museum group exhibitions including those at the Aspen Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

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The Nemesims
Muntean/Rosenblum

Team Gallery is pleased to present an installation by Vienna-based artists Muntean/Rosenblum. The exhibition, entitled The Nemesims, will run from 01 November to 21 December 2012. The gallery is located at 47 Wooster Street, cross streets Grand and Broome. Concurrently, our 83 Grand Street gallery will house a show of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Chris Vasell.

For this exhibition, Muntean/Rosenblum transform the gallery space into an exacting recreation of a home from Will Wright's popular life simulation computer game The Sims. In the game, the player watches, develops, and manipulates the simulated lives of the characters, who in every game are a family of the same name: "The Sims." The game's objective is to raise the Sims' happiness levels, which can be numerically quantified and directly attributed to the acquisition of consumer goods, including architecture, furniture, and artworks. In this infinite game, players do not win, they evolve, expand, and accumulate. The Sims can be thought of as a virtual training ground for contemporary consumer culture, making explicit capitalist conceptions of happiness.

The installation faithfully reconstructs the simulation to human scale, a physical realization of an artificial environment meant to be a blueprint for a better life - a life that can be planned, controlled, and measured. The kind of virtual domestic spaces that are possible in The Sims are a version of the idealized linear and modular structures of modernist architecture. They parrot the mid-century idea of the house as a "machine for living" that in its inherent structure can improve the resident's quality of life. The placement of artworks within the home points to their objecthood as fetishized symbols of status, and in the case of The Sims, of wealth and happiness. In The Sims, artworks are little more than pleasing decorations, emptied outlets for money, consumer goods no different from a kitchen appliance, a coffee table, or a car.

When playing the game, the player views the avatar from an omniscient bird's-eye-view perspective. The potential for a sinister abuse of power is always present: players can trap, starve, or even emotionally deprive the game's characters more easily than they can provide for them. In Muntean/Rosenblum's installation, the viewer moves through the artificial living space as the avatar, experiencing the constructed environment from within, and thusly becoming the malleable consumer rather than the god-like controlling hand. The latter position is sardonically adopted by the artists, who have arranged, constructed, and hung the space for the viewer in the same way a player of the game does for his Sims, positioning themselves as both architect and curator. The artists recontextualize the site of artificial life as a display for contemporary art, adorning the walls of the home with their new work installed alongside works by well-known mid-century and contemporary artists. The installation includes historical pieces by Alexander Calder, Gilbert & George, Keith Haring, John McCracken, Raymond Pettibon, and Laurie Simmons, among others.

The Nemesims marks a return to the artists' earlier practice of total environmental transformations of exhibition spaces. This allows them not only to thoroughly dictate the viewer's experience, but also to interact with and comment upon the contemporary and historical role of the exhibition space. In the past they have variously transformed many spaces, creating environments ranging from a desert to a submarine. Here they consider the home - both real and virtual - as the architectural armature that defines the artists' work as a status object.

Muntean/Rosenblum have been working collaboratively for twenty years, during which time they have been the subject of solo museum shows at The Tate in London, MUSAC in Léon, the Kunstverein in Salzburg, Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland, De Appel Foundation in Switzerland, SECESSION in Vienna, and many others. They have also had numerous solo gallery exhibitions in such cities as Tel Aviv, Paris, Chicago, Seoul, Berlin, Barcelona, London, Los Angeles, Turin, and Zürich. This marks their third solo show at Team.

Opening Reception 01 November 6-8 pm

Team Gallery
83 Grand Street New York
47 Wooster Street New York
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm.

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