Team (gallery, inc.) is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Köln-based artist Andreas Schulze. The exhibition will run from 17 May through 23 June 2013. Team (gallery, inc.) is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene. Concurrently, our 47 Wooster Street space will house a group exhibition organized by Todd von Ammon.
 
Andreas Schulze’s practice has most frequently resulted in immersive installations that simulate domestic settings, such as that mounted at Team’s Wooster Street space in April of 2012. Schulze appropriates familiar modern design typologies and manipulates their aesthetics into bulbous cartoonish forms, creating environments that are simultaneously familiar, uncannily bizarre and somewhat ominous. For this exhibition, Schulze has created a new cycle of paintings, all representations of windows, which play with art historical attitudes towards the authority of perception. They will be presented here within a standardized white-cube setting, thereby undercutting their illusionistic tendencies.
 
Particularly in the Baroque era, painters tested their mastery by creating trompe l’oeil tableaux, literally fooling their viewers into believing that the painting in front of them was a real, tangible mise en scene. A genre of window paintings developed from this tradition, where the frame of the painting became analogous to the frame of a window; the actual painting was supposed to represent a vista and create the same sensation as looking out of an actual window. Schulze carries forth with this tradition, reducing it to its formal essentials: frame, rendered in his typical bulbous style, and view, completely sfumato and flattened. His windows complexify the tradition of the landscape in painting history by introducing a more contemporary notion – the void. Drained of scenery, these muted vistas subvert our expectations and create, in Schulze’s own words, “a feeling of yearning by means of perspective.”
 
Five of the paintings feature handles on the frame of the window, as if to invite the viewer to open them. The two large-scale paintings in this cycle deviate from the rest and give way to views of ambiguous spaces. Through one set of windows the viewer sees an interior courtyard, while through the other, one sees simplistically rendered vines climbing the façade of the building from which the viewer is “looking.” The imagery in these paintings is opaque enough that, while they establish a plausible setting (perhaps a country villa), they resist the creation of a narrative. In this sense, these paintings reveal a kinship with the landscapes of de Chirico and Magritte; they are barren and seem to point to an underlying melancholic psychology, as well as a metaphysical sense of dislocation between past and present. Alarmingly sharp contrasts between light and shadow create an aura of poignant yet foreboding mystery in an otherwise blank scene. To gaze into a Schulze Window is to gaze into the joyously inscrutable.
 
Schulze destabilizes our intimacy with familiar, mundane subjects to question not only our relationships with these objects but the very nature of seeing. Emerging in the fertile Köln scene of the 1980s, during a renaissance of painting, Schulze became associated with a group of young painters of the Mülheimer Freiheit, the name of a shared studio in which they exhibited their work. This group included the painters Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, George Condo, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever and Gerhard Naschberger. Though working closely and frequently collaborating with these peers, Schulze has developed an anomalous and haunting painting practice whose influence is more and more widely regarded.
 
Schulze was born in Hannover in 1955 and has been exhibiting his work since 1981, his longstanding relationship with gallerist Monika Sprüth beginning in 1983. Schulze’s work has been exhibited at museums internationally including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Museum in London, the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kunstaele in Berlin and at the Kunstverein and the Sammlung Falckenberg, both in Hamburg.
 
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm, Sunday noon to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs please call 212 279 9219.

Maureen Paley is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work at the gallery by Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
 
Tim Rollins is an artist, teacher and activist who began his career as the assistant of the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth. In 1979 he co-founded Group Material in New York. In the early 1980s, he taught students at Intermediate School 52 in the Bronx and went on to create the Art & Knowledge Workshop. His highly acclaimed collaboration with the members of K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) continues to this day. Rollins combines lessons in reading and writing with making artworks. The source material laid out and studied by the students generally relates to literary or musical classics, such as works by William Shakespeare, George Orwell, Ralph Ellison or Franz Schubert, but can also include comics or legal documents.
 
Their collaborative work takes the form of drawings, photographs, sculptural objects and paintings on canvas and paper. The backgrounds of works are often comprised of pages of books pasted into a grid. The results blend elements of Minimalism with an interest in the revival of painting that took place in the 1980s and in art that is socially and politically engaged. Rollins has said: ‘What we’re doing changes people’s conception about who can make art, how art is made, who can learn and what’s possible, because a lot of these kids had been written off by the school system. This is our revenge.’
 
Inspired by the Time Traveller in H.G. Wells‘ The Time Machine (1895) the group have endeavored to explore this idea in their exhibition and have made work based on imaginary ’visitations‘ with Shakespeare, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Darwin and Strauss.
 
Their journey begins in 1590 at the time when Shakespeare was writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and simultaneously in 1826 when Mendelssohn at 17 years of age began work on his own score for a production of this play. In their work A Midsummer Night’s Dream (after Shakespeare, 1590-1596 and Mendelssohn 1826–1842) they invited young people to transform into the character of Puck, painting flowers and blossom over sheet music from Mendelssohn‘s score that was completed in 1842. Next they imagined the first performance of The Seven Last Words of Christ by Haydn in 1786 and created seven paintings that use black Spinel pigment that they applied onto pages from this score. They then visited Charles Darwin in 1837 as he began sketching out his idea of a ’Tree of Life‘ in one image that would be developed into his theory of evolution described in On the Origin of Species published in 1859.
 
In 1945 they meet with Richard Strauss in the final days of WWII while he was composing his elegiac and mournful Metamorphosen (in Memorium). This music created a deep desire within the group to reflect on their experiences working in the South Bronx that brought up feelings of tragedy and transformation, destruction and rebirth. They have created a meditation in this new body of work that memorializes, researches and remains hopeful by existing in past, present and future tenses.
 
’We embrace the idea of the arena of art existing in the fourth dimension of a social imagination beyond space and time, contingency and possibility.‘ Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
 
’The past is not dead. In fact, it‘s not even past.’ William Faulkner
 
Tim Rollins was born 1955 in Pittsfield/ME, USA and lives and works in New York. The current member of the K.O.S. are Angel Abreu, born in Philadelphia/PA, USA 1974; Jorge Abreu, born in New York/NY, USA 1979; Robert Branch, born in New York/NY, USA 1977; Daniel Castillo, born in New York/NY, USA 1982; Nelson Ricardo Savinon, born in New York/NY, USA 1971 and Bryce Zackery, born in Rochester/MN, USA 1984.
 
Solo Exhibitions include Tim Rollins and K.O.S. - On Transfiguration, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland, 2012; Tim Rollins and K.O.S. - The Black Spot, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, UK, 2012; Tim Rollins and K.O.S. - On Transfiguration, GAMeC - Galleria d´Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy, 2011; What Matters, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester/MA, USA, 2010; Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, Great Britain, 1998; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington/DC, USA, 1992; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles/CA, USA, 1990; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis/MN, USA; 1988.
 
In 2012 they contributed to the Wide Open School at the Hayward Gallery, London and they will collaborate with the School of Visual Arts and students from public schools and programmes in New York's Chelsea neighborhood to create a work for the High Line Park in New York in 2013.