Gert & Uwe Tobias: Drawings and Sculptures

Team (gallery, inc.) is pleased to announce a solo show by Romanian-born, Cologne-based artists Gert & Uwe Tobias. Entitled Drawings and Sculptures, the exhibition will run from 05 May to 05 June 2016. Team (gallery, inc.) is located at 83 Grand Street, between Greene and Wooster, on the ground floor. Concurrently, our Venice Beach space will house a solo show by Tabor Robak.

Gert & Uwe Tobias are twin brothers who work collaboratively in a variety of media. While perhaps best known in New York for their woodcut prints and collages, for this exhibition they present a series of five drawings on black-painted paper, alongside three substantial ceramic sculptures. The works in the show refer obliquely to divergent genres and moments from Art History, erasing hierarchical and temporal classification and partition via the seamless blurring and solution of their various visual inspirations and reference material.

Each of this show’s large-format works on paper features a semi-symmetrical center composition, combining elements of phantasmagorical figuration and architectural and graphic design with geometric abstraction. Executed in pastel crayon, they are adhered directly to the gallery walls, precluding visual interference with their delicate line work. The shadowy rendering and eerie palette choices – light blues and whites on the black surfaces – imbues the pictures’ chimerical forms with a spectral quality. The absence of framing further enhances the works’ ghostly character, effecting a feeling of floating insubstantiality and bodily divestment.  

Three sculptures sit atop pedestals interspersed throughout the gallery. The unified body ceramics are busts – distorted humanoid and avian faces, adorned with sunken relief floral patterns. The three-dimensional works, in their physicality, provide counterpoint and tension to the ethereality and self-conscious flatness of the wall works. In employing a classical mode of portraiture – the sculptural bust – the Tobias Brothers explicate a core conceptual facet of their artistic project: the corporeal realization of internal, private images and shared subconscious narratives. Without specifically referencing mythological archetypes, the works activate a nebula of folkloric associations in the viewer and breathe life into our common lexicon of the otherworldly and mysterious.