Tate Britain Art Now space
17 April – 20 June 2004
Tate Britain’s Art Now programme reflects current developments in contemporary British art. It consists of up to five exhibitions a year which demonstrate the quality and variety of new art in the UK.
The latest exhibition in the series will present Muntean/Rosenblum’s first show in a British museum. In tandem with Art Now, Muntean/Rosenblum will also present new work at Gloucester Road Underground Station from 24 April - 19 July 2004. These joint exhibitions, It Is Never Facts That Tell, represent an important collaboration between Tate Britain and Platform for Art, the public art programme for London Underground.
Working in a variety of media, Muntean/Rosenblum present drawings, paintings and photographs of generic adolescent figures appropriated from lifestyle and fashion magazines and then transformed into strangely compelling scenes. These constructed images of young, beautiful people frozen in awkward poses are juxtaposed with texts which have also been literally cut and pasted from printed material. There is a disconcerting ambiguity in the expressions of these impersonal figures. Their poses could either communicate pathos, reminiscent of characters from Renaissance paintings undergoing a sublime religious experience or they could simply be bored, a symbol of contemporary ennui. Similarly the disjointed phrases could speak of aspiration and promise, or they could offer notions of doubt and misunderstanding. In keeping with the deliberate uncertainty of meaning in their work, Muntean/Rosenblum question the notion of authorship by working in partnership to create a joint signature style.
For Art Now the artists will show a new video work, an installation of small scale drawings, some of which look towards the graphic style of the Russian Constructivist movement for inspiration, large scale paintings and drawings and a new sculpture. At Gloucester Road Underground Station they will present new large scale photographs which reproduce some of the drawings on display in Art Now.
The artists, both born in 1962, have worked in collaboration since 1992. They live and work in London and Vienna. Their solo exhibitions include those at Maureen Paley/Interim Art, 2003, De Appel, Amsterdam, 2002, Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus, 2000, SECESSION, Vienna, 2000
The next exhibition in the Art Now series will feature new work by Claire Barclay (3 July - 22 August 2004). Barclay has had recent solo shows at Dundee Contemporary Arts (2003) and doggerfisher, Edinburgh (2003) and contributed to Zenomap at the Venice Biennale (2003). Barclay, born 1968, lives and works in Glasgow.