GILBERT & GEORGE

NINE DARK PICTURES

October 6 – November 25, 2001

George was born in Devon, England in 1942. Gilbert was born in the Dolomites, Italy in 1943. They came from a similar family and social background – decent, lower middle class, from the country. Gilbert studied at the Munich Academy in Germany and George at the Art School in Oxford. They met at the St. Martin’s School of Art in 1967.

From the very beginning, their choice of venues for their shows and the type of work they produced clearly indicated that they intended to create sculpture, and be sculptors, in a very different way from that taught in the academic circles of the 60’s. Instead of creating anything, instead of carving and modelling sculptures, they turned the act of artistic creation into its opposite. While still at St Martins, they presented themselves as Living Sculptures: not those who form but those who have taken form. Artists and artwork were one and the same. Their impersonal expressions and gestures, extreme self control and elegant, rather old fashioned, style of dress was from then onwards to become their trademark in many different later versions.

In parallel to their «Living Sculptures», which launched them onto the international scene, they also did drawings, paintings, performances and realized photographs under the generic term of «sculpture».

In the beginning of the 70’s they made their first assemblages of Photo Pieces which evolved to their well known visual signature of huge brightly coloured, photo-based collage-pictures on a black grid. Their precise working method was carefully worked out over the years and permitted the simultaneous development of form and content and the immediate display of ever new connections.

During the 70’s their large format works evoked a disquieting and oppressive atmosphere, progressively opening toward society -unemployment, exclusion, drifting youth. The works of the following decades are frequently conceived in series with bright and varied colour schemes. Moving away from the rather realistic aspect of their early work they took on a more distanced pose, using figurative elements to evoke in a symbolic and emblematic manner the complexity and duality of humanity: religion, sex, violence, fear, desperation, the will to live and the quest for a new individuality.

A retrospective exhibition of their work reveals foremost that their development is not a stylistic one but one of content. Their art material is subservient to the meaning and the purpose of the picture. Much of their work has attempted to address taboos and has included representations of the Cross, the swastika, chains, bodily fluids and waste. It presents a flat, unemphatic image to the world and becomes charged with meanings from the wider culture. They use titles on their works which trigger readings. Word play and its association with the connected image aims to challenge and upset traditional values and preconceived ideas.

What is unique in Gilbert & George is their paired relationship. Neither of them possesses an individuality of his own, which might serve to characterize him as a person and set him apart from the other. Instead, both are linked by a state of absolute empty identity. They announced this by discarding their names. Their identical initial serves to emphasize the element of shared and hollow identity as does the stereotyped, uniform external appearance which both have adopted. This paired relationship stands for the nucleus of all social relationships: one to one. Therefore, the work they do is individual not in personal but in cultural terms: the fact that there are two of them means that they are able to give formal expression not only to the visible and audible world, but also, and above all, to the social world. Social life has come to reside above all in friendship. Art for All From the beginning of their career they have used the motto

Art for All.
They have always tried to establish an explicit, honest and unconditional relationship with their spectators. The presence of the artists themselves in most of their pictures symbolizes and at the same time emphasizes a yearning for an interactive relationship with other people; a yearning poised between a sense of individual responsibility and the transmission of a message on the one hand and a feeling of universal sympathy and suffering on the other. Their primary intention is to start up an intimate but at the same time provocative interaction with the public, in which the viewer is confronted with their message and inevitably reacts to it in some way.

«We do not believe that art is anything else than speaking to the viewer.
It is not making aesthetics for an elite»

A major retrospective exhibition of Gilbert & George takes place at «The Factory» the exhibition hall of the Art School of Fine Arts from October 5th until November 25th, 2001.