On view from October 3, 2008, through January 22, 2009, Gilbert & George comprises of more than sixty works produced since 1970, among them more than a dozen that will be seen only in the Brooklyn presentation, including a site-specific work created especially for the Museum’s fifth-floor Rotunda.
The exhibition was organized by Tate Modern, London, with the support and collaboration of the artists, who consider this to be the definitive presentation of their work. It traces their stylistic and emotional evolution through their pictures and works in other media, ranging from large-scale drawing installations from the early 1970s to postcard pieces, to ephemera, dating back to the 1960s. The Brooklyn presentation is supported by Altria Group, Inc.
Gilbert and George met in 1967 while students at St. Martin’s Art School in London. They began working as a team, developing a uniquely recognizable style both in their pictures and in their presentations of themselves as living sculptures. Working as a team for more than forty years they developed a new format that combined art and photography through a unique production process. Most of their work is produced in series and created especially for the space in which it is first exhibited.
Since 1974 Gilbert and George have used a grid system to create their works, which are now developed with the use of sophisticated digital editing techniques. In the early 1980s they began to introduce bold colors in their series of pictures, with one or more works in each group that were created on a monumental scale. All works in a series share common motifs and conceptual and formal elements. The artists’ work, which is subversive, controversial, and provocative, considers the entire cosmology of human experience and explores such themes as faith and religion, sexuality, race and identity, urban life, terrorism, superstition, AIDs-related loss, aging, and death. The works in the exhibition have been loaned from public and private collections in North America and Europe.
Included in the exhibition will be selections from the Ginkgo Pictures series which was part of the presentation that represented the United Kingdom at the 2005 Venice Biennale; examples from the 1974 Cherry Blossom series: Finding God, 1982, a complex grid featuring images of the artists, several young men, and a cross; and more recent works, among them triptych from the Six Bomb Pictures, created for the inaugural presentation of the exhibition at the Tate Modern, this work was intended by the artists to be seen as modern townscapes reflecting the daily exposure in urban life to bomb threats and terror alerts.
Gilbert was born in San Martino, Italy, in 1943. He studied at the Wolkenstein School of Art, the Hallenstein School of Art, and the Munich Academy of Art. George was born in Devon, England, in 1942 and studied at the Dartington Adult Education Centre and the Dartington Hall College of Art, as well as at the Oxford School of Art. Both attended St. Martin’s School of Art in London. For the past several decades they have lived and worked in East London in a house on Fournier Street that they have said is, in many ways, a part of their art.
The exhibition was organized by Tate Modern, London where it was curated by Jan Debbaut, former Director of Collections at Tate, and Ben Borthwick, Assistant Curator. The Brooklyn presentation is coordinated by Judy Kim, Curator of Exhibitions. -- www.brooklynmuseum.org
