Muntean/Rosenblum

Highly visible on the international art scene, the artistic duo of Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum are not as well-known in New York, but their second solo show at Team has the right stuff to raise their local profile. The Austrian-born Muntean and Israeli-born Rosenblum make realistic paintings of melancholic youth caught in narratives of urban angst. Based on a mix of appropriated magazine imagery and classical poses culled from art history, their pictures are rendered with rounded corners that lend them an illustrative look, and they’re captioned to add both an introspective voice and philosophical point of view.

Featured here are six large, loosely painted canvases. Untitled (He was unhappy…) shows a young man lying on a mattress in the woods, staring at the sky from a somewhat contorted position. The caption reads HE WAS UNHAPPY IN A WAY UNKNOWN TO MEDIOCRE SOULS. The trees around him are as barren as the bed he rests upon while the reasons for his unhappiness are left for us to divine.

Untitled (Because there is no escape…) portrays a teenage girl and small boy on an escalator. The girl is staring upward, but since she faces us while the boy has his back turned away, it’s hard to tell if she’s coming or going. The full caption, which reads BECAUSE THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM WHAT DOES NOT EXIST, only adds to the intrigue.

The power of these paintings and the others on view is that they don’t answer questions. Rather, they pose them in psychologically engaging ways.—Paul Laster

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