Online Special: Muntean/Rosenblum
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Sommer Contemporary Art is pleased to present an online exhibition of works by Muntean/Rosenblum. Marcus Muntean was born in 1962 in Graz, Austria; Adi Rosenblum was born in 1962 in Haifa, Israel; They met in Vienna in 1992 and have been living and creating together ever since in Vienna as a duo, under the name Muntean/ Rosenblum.

In their artistic practice, they sample and appropriate images from different media platforms. This additional “palette” allows them to mix images like colors. They take lines of texts and images out of their contexts, in a way reminiscent of DJs. It is a sampling process that sets up a dialogue between real life and fiction in which high and low art references unfold simultaneously.

Muntean/Rosenblum had solo exhibitions in numerous venues, including: Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico (2020), CFalive, Milano, Italy (2019), MAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Coruña, Spain (2018), MOCAK, Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow, Poland (2018), and Parkview Museum, Beijing, China (2017).

For further information about the exhibition, please contact us at info@somergallery.com.

The online exhibition includes a selection from a new series of drawings the duo had started to produce during the first lockdown: “In these peculiar times, online photo streams turned even more into visual diaries. We appropriated fragile and intimate moments from them. Idyllic at first sight but still uncanny, stressing the melancholy of transience”.

By using pastel chalks, they aspire to convey the fragility of the existence and how quickly the familiar turns alien: “In the recent past we experienced very ambiguous emotions: anxiety and insecurity mixed with hope, a romantic longing for change. Suddenly everyday life turned almost fictional and our own artistic imagery seemed to mirror elements of the new reality”.

The characters in their works are arranged in groups of isolated individuals – there is no real communication between them. They appear as a fragmented multitude of islands drifting apart on a sea of preformatted information streams. In times of social distancing, it seems as if everybody is an island.