Muntean and Rosenblum


Muntean/Rosenblum is a collaborative artist duo composed of Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum. They have been collaborating since 1992.
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Background

Adi Rosenblum and Markus Muntean met each other as students at the Academy of [Fine Arts in Vienna], Austria. In 1992 they sublimated their subjective singularity into a double act, into a third person: Mutean/Rosenblum. In 1995 they founded Bricks & Kicks, one of the first Artist-Run galleries in Vienna. They were professors for Contextual Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1999 to 2005 and received the nationally prestigious City of Vienna Prize for Visual Arts in 2001.

Work

In the compositions of their drawings, the artist couple Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum use methods of sampling and resampling of subjects from art history and present-day popular culture. The starting point is an intensive confrontation with the pathos formulas of art history and the questioning of how emotions that find expression as a result are articulated and interpreted in different eras. Motifs that we know from Passion cycles are applied to the psychological dispositions of contemporary existence, sometimes as the expression of an apathy that appeals to the empathy of the beholder. Historically overwhelming pictorial subjects are transferred into the present day, while at the same time triggering a discussion of the media conditions in which pictures are produced today. As a result of the use of language and lettering, a further plane penetrates into the drawings of Muntean and Rosenblum and gives insights into the complexity of the challenges which a subtle medium such as drawing has to face up to today. In the process, Muntean and Rosenblum also take an interest in the aspect of the nomadic narrative. The text collages form, in their relationship with the scenic compositions, aphorisms which pointedly contradict phrases of popular culture, and, through their paradoxical link with figural representations, awaken a dual consciousness.

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