Gilbert and George : The Major Exhibition

Gilbert and George : The Major Exhibition HAM 12.10.2018 - 24.02.2019

Gilbert & Georges’ art embodies a palette of contradictions and extremes; madness and normality, the reactionary and radical, and the traditional and ultra-modern. With this their art remains timelessly modern, confrontational and yet poetic. The exhibition consists over 50 pictures created between 1991 and 2016, in an installation filling the main, upper floor galleries at Tennis Palace.

Gilbert & George (born 1943 and 1942, respectively) met as students at St. Martin’s School of Art, London, in 1967. The artists are not only the creators of their art but also the central subject. They are two people but one artist, expressing life with a singular vision—they are the art of Gilbert & George, and their life is art.

Gilbert & George’s art expresses their own array of feelings and thoughts. They draw inspiration from the social fabric and the underlying tensions, restlessness, and contrasts of the modern world we all share—especially that of their own metropolis and that of London’s East End, where they have lived and created art together for over fifty years.

THE MAJOR EXHIBITION has been curated and the installation designed by Gilbert & George, specifically for HAM. It consists pictures from 10 major groups of pictures including NEW DEMOCRATIC PICTURES, NAKED SHIT PICTURES, JACK FREAK PICTURES, SCAPEGOATING PICTURES and UTOPIAN PICTURES. The most represented pictures in this exhibition series are from their most recent THE BEARD PICTURES, which includes the extraordinary triptych OLD BEARD RUIN (2016) of over 20 metres in length. The installation of pictures is neither chronological, nor thematical, rather a powerful and unique composition of art.

With a visionary yet anarchistic seriousness at its core, their pictures confront us with brutal realism intended to provoke, interrogate, disrupt, and inspire. Mixed with the romantic, the archaic meets the contemporary; multicultural traditions, taboos, morality, systems of belief, politics, sexuality, love, violence, poverty, and the global, virtual world. Harmony and conflict are at eternal odds and the fantastical meets the commonplace in this ground-breaking exhibition.

THE MAJOR EXHIBITION is Gilbert & George’s first significant exhibition held in the Nordic countries during the last two decades and showcases pictures exhibited for the first time in Finland.

Tekijät: Gilbert & George, Claire Gould
Kustantaja: HAM
Ulkoasu: 223 sivua : kuvitettu ; 30 x 25 cm
Julkaistu: 2018
Pehmeäkantinen