Gert & Uwe Tobias - Untitled '13

Team Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by the Romanian-born, Köln-based artists Gert & Uwe Tobias. The exhibition will take place in both gallery spaces and run from the 21st of February through the 30th of March 2013. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, and at 47 Wooster Street, cross streets Grand and Broome. 

Since the early 2000s, Gert and Uwe Tobias, artist collaborative and twin brothers, have developed a unique and multivalent practice that covers the spectrum of media from drawing, collage, typography, painting and printmaking, to ceramics and installation. Their work typically incorporates such contradictions as abstraction with figuration, modernism with folklore, technology with craft, and comedy with tragedy. Tobias installations frequently include organizational arrangements of colorful, architectonic wall painting and structural effects that act as both connectors among disparate elements — all “untitled” — and enactors of the mirroring strategies of reflection and symmetry. The many forms which their work takes help locate the images within a wider vocabulary of art history, collective memory, and political and personal history.

The Tobias brothers have become known most prominently for their large-scale woodblock prints on paper and canvas, where they utilize the ancient stamping technique of black-and-white small scale illustrative printmaking in anachronistic, elaborate, and oversize chromatic compositions. The artists develop flat, matte, and dark grounds onto which graphic patterns, organic forms, and ambiguous, amalgamated figures are set. The objects and bodies of the Tobias tableaux are often drawn from archetypal folk figures of their Transylvanian heritage, including the notable character Vlad the Impaler, as well as Romanian political lineages of dictatorial urbanization and Socialist architecture. The mingling of abstract and faintly gridded grounds with mysterious physiognomies acts as a way to line up the experiences of rigid geometric and abstract modernism with the popular symbols and narratives of figurative art history.