Are Two Heads Better Than One?

It’s not uncommon for artists to join forces as collaborators — Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque formed one such famous partnership. But rarely have artists and their creative output been so closely entwined as that of Uwe and Gert Tobias, twin brothers who live and work together, creating art in mediums both traditional and innovative. In their first New York museum installation, at the Museum of Modern Art, it is clear the brothers venerate craftsmanship even though it is impossible to distinguish one brother’s hand from the other’s in the artwork. The exhibition is MoMA’s latest “Projects” series, a showcase for emerging artists, and includes 21 large-scale woodcuts, sculpture, drawings, and works on paper.The brothers, who are based in Cologne, Germany, maintain three studios: two individual work spaces and one communal area for trading a work in progress back and forth, sharing ideas and labor, editing, and even copying each other’s contributions, coaxing the work into completion before bestowing upon it both signatures. Moving deftly between figurative and abstract art, their formal vocabulary is indebted to the Surrealists and Symbolists, such as Arshile Gorky and Edvard Munch, as well as the geometric abstraction of Russian Constructivism. Their charming architectonic “typewriter” drawings are reminiscent of the poetry of the French avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who transformed his own typewritten text into imagery. But it is the former Communist-bloc nation Romania, especially its history, mythologies, and folklore traditions, that is the primary entry point into the Tobias’s artistic vision.The Tobias brothers were born in the Romanian city of Brasov, located at the base of Transylvania’s Carpathian Alps. And although the family, as members of the city’s German minority community, received permission to leave Romania when the twins were 12, Brasov’s medieval roots and its notorious ruler, Vlad the Impaler, loom large in their collective imagination. MoMA’s installation walls are painted a penetrating midnight blue with a single white line tracing the perimeter. The line acts as a kind of picture railing that unifies the works hung at varying intervals and heights throughout the room. The art is ablaze with the strong colors and geometric patterns typically found in Eastern European textiles, red and black, but also rich greens, blues, and oranges. Color is highly symbolic in Romanian textile design. Red, for instance, suggests vitality and life, while black signifies old age.There are several small works on paper in which the primary motif is two child-like figures with lumpish bodies, stringy hair, painted smiles, and the googly eyes of a rag doll. Each image is delicately constructed of pencil, collage, ink, and gouache, often in shadowy hues of blue and green, with complementary touches of purple or yellow for subtle tonal and pictorial effects. The figures are spectral and enigmatic. One appears to be a girl, but it’s hard not to see the figures as alter egos of the Tobias twins and their enmeshed relationship. One image, in which one child tenderly rests his head against the shoulder of the other, is a particularly sensitive rendering of this obviously intimate pairing.There are three large-scale woodcuts on view that demonstrate the Tobias brothers’ complex approach to printmaking. Each block is designed and cut in the shared studio space. Then the brothers print and piece together the image in their individual workspaces. Sixteen sheets of printed paper are assembled into a single image. The prints themselves are densely layered with pigment and yet retain the mottled imperfections of the printing process. Each sheet appears to be printed with several different blocks to build layers of color. It is almost impossible to trace the progress from one printing stage to the next. The images themselves, however, are strictly two-dimensional. One of the woodcuts comprises five elongated figures, heads on poles — a reference to Vlad the Impaler’s preferred means for displaying his victims. The schematized heads — a carnival mask, a wooden nesting doll’s smiling face — are less hapless victims than cartoon substitutes, reflecting the Tobiases’s larger concerns with identity and anonymity. The violence of Vlad’s deeds and, more broadly, the violence throughout Romania’s history, is only evident in three ceramic figurines placed in the center of the room. Each lumpen humanoid shape has been mutilated by pencil punctures. One head even appears to have had its eye viciously gouged out.The installation could have benefited from more guided material to help visitors unfamiliar with these newcomers’ oeuvre to better absorb the cultural and historical references, particularly since so much of the artists’ work is based on a region that is still emerging from its prior isolation from the Western world. As it stands, unfortunately, Gert’s and Ute’s love of the mysterious risks leaving the viewer in the dark.Until February 25 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).

Are Two Heads Better Than One?

Are Two Heads Better Than One?

More from the New York Sun

Sinatra Sang Bacharach—But Only Twice

Terence Fisher’s Monsters Rise Again

Toyota Gets Back on the Wagon

Apple Rushes its First Folding iPhone Launch — But Most Buyers Must Wait To Get One

Ohio Governor’s Race Tilts Toward Democrats After Ramaswamy’s Controversial Attack Ad

Kim Jong Un Pays Surprise Visit to Communist China, Reviving Talk of a Possible Summit With Trump

Cézanne, Modigliani, and Soutine: Parisian Rebels Who Made Art Modern Reunite at Brooklyn Museum

Escalating Protests, Security Concerns Overshadow NFL’s Paris Debut

More from the New York Sun

Sinatra Sang Bacharach—But Only Twice

Terence Fisher’s Monsters Rise Again

Toyota Gets Back on the Wagon

Apple Rushes its First Folding iPhone Launch — But Most Buyers Must Wait To Get One

Ohio Governor’s Race Tilts Toward Democrats After Ramaswamy’s Controversial Attack Ad

Kim Jong Un Pays Surprise Visit to Communist China, Reviving Talk of a Possible Summit With Trump

Cézanne, Modigliani, and Soutine: Parisian Rebels Who Made Art Modern Reunite at Brooklyn Museum

Escalating Protests, Security Concerns Overshadow NFL’s Paris Debut