Ellis von Sternberg & Parker von Sternberg

Ellis von Sternberg & Parker von Sternberg use readymades, contracts, and transactions to intensify artistic practice as a tradition of freedom and autonomous expression. To do so they disperse their personal artistic intentions through the non-artistic terms set by the consignors and colleagues from whom they source materials, designs, and fabrication. These terms become explicitly involved as part of an artwork’s eventual formal outcome. The result is impassive and chameleon-like: the way a work of art looks is unique to how it was made and what it was made from, but the how and the what of the object are subordinate to the initial reasons organizing why whoever made it came to do so in the manner that they did. As that which stems from the brothers creativity, and the pretense to facilitate any critical or material emancipation beholden to it, each project is mortgaged through a series of derivative proprietary claims extracting another’s work, resources, and ideas.

Ellis von Sternberg (b. 1990, Minneapolis, MN) & Parker von Sternberg (b. 1988, Minneapolis, MN) are an artist duo based between New York and Minneapolis. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Louche Ops (Berlin, DE), Basel Social Club (Basel, CH), King’s Leap (New York, NY), 4th Ward Project Space (Chicago, IL). Selected group exhibitions include N/A (Seoul, KR); Twelve Ten Gallery (Chicago, IL), Freddy (Harris, NY), Gallery Albany (Albany, NY), Triest (Brooklyn, NY), The Knockdown Center (Brooklyn, NY).