New work by Muntean/Rosenblum, Guillaume Pinard and Banks Violette. The Ice Age brings together the work of a Vienna based collaborative, a French animator who lives and works in Marseille, and a New York sculptor and installation artist. The title of Margaret Drabble's British novel seemed to perfectly describe the tone of the work on view - both frigid and cruel. Drabble's novel, which traffics in urban decay, class antagonism and pubescent sulkiness, was first published in 1977 during the declining period of the Labour Party as Margaret Thatcher solidified her ascent to power. The title also serves to umbrella the exhibition's eschewing of color: all of the works in The Ice Age - videos, drawings and sculptures - are in black and white; the comfort of color is everywhere absent.
Muntean/Rosenblum, Guillaume Pinard, Banks Violette
Team Gallery will present new work by Muntean/Rosenblum, Guillaume Pinard and Banks Violette from the 11th of November through the 23rd of December 2004. The gallery is located at 527 West 26th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, on the ground floor.
The Ice Age brings together the work of a Vienna based collaborative, a French animator who lives and works in Marseille, and a New York sculptor and installation artist. The title of Margaret Drabble's British novel seemed to perfectly describe the tone of the work on view Ñ both frigid and cruel. Drabble's novel, which traffics in urban decay, class antagonism and pubescent sulkiness, was first published in 1977 during the declining period of the Labour Party as Margaret Thatcher solidified her ascent to power. For the British left, the eighties would indeed be an Ice Age. The correspondence to our own contemporary political climate is quite obvious. The title also serves to umbrella the exhibition's eschewing of color: all of the works in The Ice Age - videos, drawings and sculptures - are in black and white; the comfort of color is everywhere absent.
Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum have been working collaboratively since 1992. During that time they have used a staggering variety of media to approach consumer culture and its effects on youth. The intense melancholy of their work is always offset by a cunning use of ironic distantiation which serves to position the spectator in the privileged position of knowing accomplice. The Ice Age will mark the first time that one of their video works has been show in the U.S. They most recently exhibited their work at the Sao Paolo Biennale.
Guillaume Pinard, an artist based in Marseille, is known in Europe for intensely violent Flash animations in which the dynamics of love and work are schematized as repeating actions of brutality. He has also been steadily producing a body of witty drawings that invent and then destroy an imaginative community of cuddly, yet loathsome, creatures. He will be represented here by a projected animation and a number of drawings. This is Pinard's first showing in the U.S.
Banks Violette will exhibit a pair of large sculptures and a suite of drawings. In these works, Violette uses minimal forms, which read as "stage" and "screen," to act as reflective backdrops for a space in which the political valence of cultural representations can be gauged. Using recurrent motifs - the dominant one here is that of the sunset - Violette mines the domain of the romantic, and its triggered subjective emotions, to launch a number of possible social readings. This is Violette's first showing in New York since his appearance in last spring's Whitney Biennial.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs, please call 212.279.9219. A second three-person show, in which all of the gathered works are in black and white, will open at Team in mid-February. It will be, in a sense, a sequel to this show.
Image: Guillame Pinard, Le fleuve, 2004, ink on paper, 8.5 x 13.25 inches
team (gallery, inc.)
527 w 26 st
ny ny 10001
tel +1 212 279 92 19
fax +1 212 279 92 20