GILBERT & GEORGE KICK OFF U. S. TOUR AT DE YOUNG MUSEUM IN SAN FRANCISCO

By Antoine du Rocher

SAN FRANCISCO, 15 FEBRUARY 2008 - A modified version of an itinerant retrospective of the eccentric celebrity British duo Gilbert & George makes its U.S. debut tomorrow at San Francisco's de Young Museum. Comprising more than 50 pictures made since 1971, the exhibition, designed by the artists and already seen in London and Munich, traces their stylistic and emotional development from their early performance pieces to their large-scale and sometimes sexually explicit or racially-charged photomontages, notably those where they appear naked in blood, urine or human waste, which have attracted both fierce controversy and enormous media attention ever since the pair won the Turner Prize in 1986.

In this retrospective, rarely seen pieces such as Dusty Corners ,1975 and Cherry Blossom, 1976, feature alongside major quadripartite pictures such as Death Hope Life Fear, 1984 and Shitty Naked Human World, 1994. Gilbert & George have also created a new group of six pictures for the exhibition entitled Six Bomb Pictures, comprising a 14-metre triptyc entitled Bomb and five other pictures: Bombs; Bomber; Bombers; Bombing; and Terror. The artists have described this group as their most chilling to date. The exhibition also includes postcard pieces, films, books and documentation.

Gilbert & George, Gink, 2005. Collection Maja Hoffmann
© Gilbert & George
Photo courtesy of de Young Museum

A spokesperson for the de Young confirmed Wednesday that the show has been modified to fit the smaller gallery spaces of the San Francisco museum. Thus, the more than 200 works seen earlier at the Tate Modern, London, Haus der Kunst, Munich and the Castello de Rivoli in Torino have been reduced to a little more than 50. Works such as the charcoal on paper sculpture The Nature of Our Looking, 1970, some of the large-scale pictures such as Life Without End, 1982 or the 15-metres-long Named 2001 won't be on view. The exhibition is, however, accompanied by The Complete Pictures, a comprehensive, illustrated, double-volume featuring 1,479 plates with an in-depth analysis of their oeuvre by Rudi Fuchs. There is also a 200-page exhibition catalogue which features essays by Jan Debbaut, Ben Borthwick, novelist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell and art historian Marco Livingstone and this reproduces all the works as seen in the E.U. exhibition.

George was born in Devon in 1942. Gilbert was born in Italy in 1943, in a small village in the Dolomites. They met as students on the sculpture course at St Martins School of Art, London in 1967, where they exhibited together and soon began to create art together. They adopted the identity of 'living sculptures' in both their art and their daily lives, becoming not only creators, but also the art itself. Since the early 1970s they have created pictures in series or groups of black and white, then coloured, pictures. They began to introduce bold colours in the early 1980s and subsequent groups usually include one or more pictures realised on a monumental scale. Each shares common motifs and conceptual and formal elements. Among the themes that recur are religion, sexuality, race and identity, what it is to live in a metropolis and the tensions and desires that can arise from the proximity of disparate cultural traditions and values.

Gilbert & George will travel to the Milwaukee Art Museum June through September 2008, and ends its international tour at the Brooklyn Museum of Art October 2008 through January 2009.

Gilbert & George
16 February - 18 May 2008
de Young Museum
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
Golden Gate Park
San Francisco, CA
Tel: (1) 415 863 33 30

Above photo: Gilbert & George: Life
Photo courtesy of de Young Museum

Related Culturekiosque Archives

Please click here for a Culturekiosque review with pictures of Gilbert & George's retrospective in Paris. .

Art in the Dark: Scene and Herd at the New de Young Museum

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