Muntean / Rosenblum

Needless To Say

Muntean/Rosenblum utilize a variety of media forms of expression for their “polyphonic“ structure, and this approach allows […] for ever-varying constructions of a meaning. They combine sculpture with painting and photography in their tableaux vivantes which, as “performative installations, not only represent  platforms for performances but, in the exhibition context, are also objects containing the photographic documentation of an action. […]

In so doing, Muntean/Rosenblum often shake up the traditional qualities of their media or disturb supposed abstractions: performers frozen in a pose become sculpture in the tableaux vivantes, painted figures appear more lifelike than their living counterparts, toys are blown up to life-size reality, narration mutates to gesture, comic worlds to paintings on a grand scale, originals to the motifs of media metamorphic processes. […]

Muntean/Rosenblum make use of motifs and elements from art history in their sculptures as well as in their paintings and pictorial narratives; principally, of course, from a time when painting produced in the Christian Occident developed and perfected––for the purpose of broadened effectiveness––its own iconographic vocabulary and potential for the dissemination of religious and philosophical ideas. Color symbolism, hand gestures and bodily poses, attributes and principles of composition: all these are translated and applied to the present, where they become the artificially colorful sets of a toy world with a Playmobil aesthetic––a world in which do-it-yourself machines have left behind stigmata in contemporary pictures of the saints: tennis shoes, accessoires, “in“ labels, or appliances and tools such as refrigerators, chainsaws, cement mixers, vacuum cleaners, and cars become attributes, while the bodily gestures we recognize from fitness clubs, from the „house“ scene and the youth scene in general become a new vocabulary for the iconographic presence of the human figure and of narrative image content. […]

Beatrix Ruf, “What a Moment, She Said, to Remember,” in: exhibition catalogue Muntean/Rosenblum, Secession, Vienna, 2000, pp. 54f.