Curated by Martin Esteves and Nicole Francis

Best Played with a Straight Face, is a group exhibition featuring the work of Caroline Burghardt, Phil Chang, Martin Esteves, Peter Fagundo, Andreas Fischer, Simone Huelser, Alex Jovanovich, Keiko Narahashi, Christopher Rose, Omar Vera and an anonymous contributor.

The exhibition focuses on the use of customary disciplines in art as an alternative to the extreme pluralism of the contemporary scene. These artists embrace traditional media - photography, painting, sculpture - and push the respective conventions to transcend into something more radical and evocative. When an artwork allows for imaginative leaps without need of flagrant style, it is best played with a straight face.

The show is not intended to be dismissive of today¹s fashionable pluralism (of form, anyway) but to think about its consequences. In his review of the Whitney Biennial for ³The Nation,² Arthur Danto writes: “A certain price may be paid for this pluralism, in art as in life. In art the price is that often one does not know what one is looking at, or what a work means, or why it is there.” This exhibition suggests an alternative structure in which the work itself defies expectation.