Name: Muntean/Rosenblum
Start: 2024-05-03
End: 2024-12-01
Location: Städel Museum

As if looking through a magnifying glass, Muntean/Rosenblum address central themes of our time: the ambivalence of human existence, the growing insecurity of the individual, and a pervasive sense of transience.

Your Visit

Tue, Wed, Fri, Sat, Sun 10 am – 6 pm
Thur 10 am – 9 pm
Mon closed
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Entry From €16 / €14, €9 Tue from 3 pm
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Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
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About the Exhibition

The two artists Markus Muntean (b. 1962) and Adi Rosenblum (b. 1962) have been working together since the 1990s. In their primarily painterly oeuvre, they impressively combine their identities to create one artistic signature. The Städel Museum is dedicating a solo exhibition in its Contemporary Art Collection to the artist duo, featuring a video work and eleven large-format paintings.

With their interlinking of past and present, the works of the artist duo Muntean/Rosenblum fit perfectly into the Städel Museum’s collection, which spans more than 700 years of art.

Philipp Demandt, Director, Städel Museum

Muntean/Rosenblum
Untitled (“To hope is dangerous…”), 2023
Muntean/Rosenblum
Untitled (“Nothing fixes a thing…”), 2010
Muntean/Rosenblum
Untitled (“We do not have...”), 2023
Exhibition Film

The settings are places of transit: shopping centres, airport terminals, hotels, or offices. Immersed in their own thoughts, the young protagonists stare intently at their smartphones or gaze into the distance, are in motion or look out at the viewer with boredom or irritation.

The work of Muntean/Rosenblum fluctuates between the influences of past art periods and contemporary pop-cultural phenomena. While their compositions are firmly anchored in the pictorial memory of art history, referencing well-known masterpieces from the Renaissance to Modernism, their figures are taken entirely from the present. They stem from an image archive established over many years, fed by photographs from lifestyle magazines, the Internet, and their own photo shoots. The artist duo uses this rich pool of images as a basis for creating peculiar scenes through the medium of painting: Set against anonymous urban backdrops, the dramatically arranged young people look like isolated extras in a contemporary stage play. Strange and at the same time familiar in their composition, the paintings reflect an atmosphere of lethargy and indifference. It is a painful yet liberating moment that marks the transition from adolescence to adulthood – a state of limbo. As if looking through a magnifying glass, Muntean/Rosenblum address central themes of our time: the ambivalence of human existence, the growing insecurity of the individual, and a pervasive sense of transience.

Curator
Svenja Grosser (Head of the Contemporary Art Collection, Städel Museum)

Project Coordinator
Maja Lisewski (Assistant curator, Contemporary Art Collection, Städel Museum)

Exhibition Views

As Muntean/Rosenblum take great care to deprive their works of a thematic statement, the viewer is challenged in his or her own perception: What does one want to see? How does one interpret the scene? What is real and what is not? The painting unfolds in this field of tension, between these poles, and is thus perhaps even closer to abstraction than to figuration.

Svenja Grosser, Head of the Contemporary Art Collection and curator of the exhibition, Städel Museum

Gallery

**Muntean/Rosenblum**
Untitled (“It's the tragedy of...”), 2016

**Muntean/Rosenblum**
Untitled (“To hope is dangerous…”), 2023

**Muntean/Rosenblum**
Untitled (“We do not have...”), 2023

**Muntean/Rosenblum**
Untitled (“What lies ahead...”) 2023

**Muntean/Rosenblum**
Untitled (“Nothing fixes a thing…”), 2010

About Muntean/Rosenblum

Markus Muntean (b. 1962 in Graz, Austria) and Adi Rosenblum (b. 1962 in Haifa, Israel) have been collaborating since 1992 and live in Vienna. Their work has been presented internationally in solo exhibitions, including at the Albertina, Vienna, Austria (2022); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kraków, Poland (2018); the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, A Coruña, Spain (2018); the Parkview Museum, Beijing, China (2017); the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany (2007); and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León, Spain (2006). The artist duo is represented in numerous collections, including those of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Léon, Spain; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kraków, Poland; the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; and the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, the Belvedere 21er Haus, the Albertina, and the Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, Austria.