23 Feb 2012 to 24 Mar 2012
Hours : Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 6pm
Team Gallery
83 Grand Street
47 Wooster Street
New York, NY
10013
New York
North America
T: +1 212 .279. 9219
F: +1 212.279.9220
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W: www.teamgallery.com
Andreas Schulze, Untitled (Köln Room 2), 2010 installation view at Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg, mixed media
23 February - 24 March 2012 Opening Reception 23 February 6-8 pm
Team Gallery is pleased to present an installation of new work by Köln-based artist Andreas Schulze. The exhibition will run from February 23rd through March 24th, 2012. Team Gallery is located at 47 Wooster Street, cross streets Grand and Broome. Concurrently, our 83 Grand Street space will debut new work by New York-based painter Davis Rhodes.
Andreas Schulze's practice allows for complex architectural settings that delight in domestic furniture and manicured gardens that have excessively round, full, and deep anatomies. For the artist's first exhibition at Team Gallery, Schulze presents new paintings alongside painted and found objects like lamps, tables, chairs, carpets, and curtains, accompanied by a hand-painted gallery floor. The immersive and site-specific installation re-configures the variable spatial relationships of viewer and object, viewer and window, viewer and painting.
The installation includes various domestic furniture pieces in the working method of Allan Kaprow or Gilbert and George, for instance - situated in a congruent zone of life and art. Human-scaled harlequin lamps have thick, patterned trucks topped with bulbous, oversized shades. A carpet placed at the entryway functions as a domestic doormat, while a second carpet is installed in the corner as a three-sided inverted-pyramid sculpture. Entitled Dirt Corner, the material is painted in gradients to gradually shade to black in the center, a humorous household dust bunny doubling as an intergalactic black hole. A hanging curtain presents the façade of a small home with one door and one window, while simultaneously functioning as a space divider one might find inside a massive living area. Painted cotton panels function as unusable tablecloths, elaborately covering a table's surface in a parallel gesture to the horizontal painting that covers the floor.
The subjects of Schulze's work are impenetrable windows, doors, and mirrors, nebulous interiors and landscapes. He obsessively undulates between hard and soft, inside and outside, playful and melancholic, comfortable and menacing. His flat painting style paired with the extreme depth of his illusions belies Schulze's complicated relationship to the history of painting. He employs the perspectival foreshortening and sfumato tonal shading techniques of realism that date back to the Renaissance, in addition to using the barren landscape backgrounds of Surrealism, the absurd object mash-ups of dada, the accessible furniture design art of Wiener Werkstätte and the Bauhaus, and the dramatically rendered subjects of neo-expressionist painting of the 1980s, among which his work was first shown and associated. His painted room and object installations stand in close relationship to the elaborate narrative scenes set by Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, and Kurt Schwitters.
Schulze's intricate and evocative dramatic sites are reminiscent of Wagnerian opera or ancient Greek theater. Schulze returns to New York with a poetic, yet tense, amalgam of installation, painting, and sculpture, in which every object is sabotaged furniture, a decorated and mythic object for living, suffused with extreme magnitude while rinsed of all function. Schulze was born in Hannover in 1955 and has been exhibiting his work since 1981. Last year the artist had a major survey exhibition with an extensive catalogue published by the Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg and the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren. Schulze's work has been exhibited at museums internationally including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Museum in London, and the Kunstforeningen in Copenhagen, among many others.
Davis Rhodes Untitled '12
23 February - 24 March 2012 Opening Reception 23 February 6-8 pm
Team is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Davis Rhodes. The exhibition will run from February 23rd through March 24th, 2012. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, between Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor. Concurrently, our 47 Wooster Street space will house an installation by Köln-based artist Andreas Schulze.
For his second solo exhibition at Team, Davis Rhodes presents a selection of paintings made with spray paint on foamcore board. Using the logic of radical material transformation, lightweight panels lean flat against the wall, while others, warped by the application of water-based paint, stand independently in space. At the standard size of eight feet tall by four feet wide, the paintings have a bold physical presence in the gallery that belies their precarious material means.
Rhodes' work carries strong reference to post-painterly and hard-edge abstraction in addition to the deep influence of pop appropriation spanning from commercial signage to the guerilla tactics of amateur street advertising. As with his previous bodies of work, Rhodes channels the aesthetic practices of public visual economy into his abstractions. His paintings are composed of an economical vernacular: hard, clean lines; sheer reflective fields of color; and open, iconic signs, appear to contain a clear communicative promise. The works challenge the viewer with mute austerity as stark signs that refuse to perform as signifiers. Some pieces resemble imploded mirrors, offering only shadowy reflections and subtle visual distortions, while others are blank slabs, mirroring only the white space of the gallery. With opaque colors and the layering of whites, Rhodes' work complicates ideas of frontal forms in painting while at the same time denying real references.
The large glossy surfaces are scattered with drips, leaks, cracks, discolorations and folds which are subtle traces of the parallel and unpoetic painterly reality of the materials Rhodes employs. The functional, base application of spray paint to foamboard is emphatically outside the frame of painting and the context of the gallery. This external provenance persists in the work as antithetical to the pristine and protected presence of unique objects viewed within the gallery setting. The works hinge on the tension of display versus use values, suggesting the impermanence of their visual status.
The obstructions and reflections in Rhodes' work mime situationist, interventionist, and textual gestures of reversal and provocation. These monolithic forms combine the extreme restrictions of minimalism and monochromes with an open, porous practice that finds practical antecedents in the positions of Arte Povera and post-minimalism. Rhodes' emphasized material strategies echo a legacy of artists as diverse as Blinky Palermo, Gordon Matta-Clark, Oliver Mosset, Robert Ryman, and Richard Serra.
