Download
Favorite
Send
Print
Gilbert & George
- Dates: October 3, 2008 through January 11, 2009
- Collections: Contemporary Art
- Location:
This exhibition is no longer on view
in Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, 4th and 5th Floors - Description: Gilbert & George. [10/03/2008-01/11/2009]. Installation view.
- Citation: Brooklyn Museum. Digital Collections and Services (DIG_E_2008_Gilbert)
- Source: born digital
- Related Links:
-
... more
March 2008: The Brooklyn Museum will be the final venue of an international tour of the first retrospective in more than twenty-five years of work by the internationally acclaimed artistic team Gilbert & George. 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.
Gilbert & George is organized by Tate Modern in association with the Brooklyn Museum.
Gilbert & George: Complete Pictures, a comprehensive, illustrated, two-volume catalogue featuring 1,479 plates with an in-depth analysis of the Gilbert & George oeuvre by the art historian Rudi Fuchs, accompanies the exhibition. In addition, there is a 200-page exhibition catalogue produced by Tate Publishing that features essays by Jan Debbaut, curator; Ben Borthwick, assistant curator at Tate Modern; Michael Bracewell, novelist and cultural commentator; and Marco Livingstone, art historian.
Additional support is provided by James Chanos, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Sonnabend Gallery, Francis Greenburger, Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, Howard Wolfson, and other generous donors.
The Brooklyn Museum presentation is one of three in North America. Other venues included the de Young Museum, San Francisco (February-May 2008); the Milwaukee Art Museum (June-September 2008); Castello de Rivoli, Turin (October 2007-January 2008); Haus der Kunst, Munich (June-September, 2007); and Tate Modern (February-May 2007).
Press Coverage of this Exhibition
- Two Sculptures Look BackOctober 3, 2008 Produced by Emily Weinstein/The New York Times Audio by Sylvia Rupani-Smith/The New York Times"The subjects of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, the British artists Gilbert & George look back on their work...."
- ART REVIEW | GILBERT & GEORGE; Provocative Duo, Naked and NattyOctober 3, 2008 By HOLLAND COTTERHolland Cotter revi`
- Museum and Gallery ListingsOctober 10, 2008 By THE NEW YORK TIMES"ART Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. Museums ASIA SOCIETY AND MUSEUM: 'ART AND CHINA'S REVOLUTION,' through Jan. 11. The splashy party that was the 2008 Olympics is yesterday's news, but one-party rule in China remains. New China is still, in significant ways, Old..."
- The ListingsOctober 10, 2008 "ART Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. Museums BRONX MUSEUM OF THE ARTS: 'STREET ART STREET LIFE: FROM THE 1950S TO NOW,' through Jan. 25. If to you ''street life'' means noise-lights-action, you'll find this show a surprise. With its immaculate, stripped-down..."
- Museum and Gallery ListingsOctober 17, 2008 By THE NEW YORK TIMES"ART Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. Museums ASIA SOCIETY AND MUSEUM: 'ART AND CHINA'S REVOLUTION,' through Jan. 11. The splashy party that was the 2008 Olympics is yesterday's news, but one-party rule in China remains. New China is still, in significant ways, Old..."
- ArtOctober 17, 2008 By THE NEW YORK TIMES"ART Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. Museums * ASIA SOCIETY AND MUSEUM: 'TRACES OF THE CALLIGRAPHER: ISLAMIC CALLIGRAPHY IN PRACTICE, CIRCA 1600-1900' AND 'WRITING THE WORD OF GOD: CALLIGRAPHY AND THE QUR'AN,' through Feb. 8. These side-by-side exhibitions, perfect in..."
- Museum and Gallery ListingsOctober 24, 2008 By THE NEW YORK TIMES"ART Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. Museums ASIA SOCIETY AND MUSEUM: 'ART AND CHINA'S REVOLUTION,' through Jan. 11. The splashy party that was the 2008 Olympics is yesterday's news, but one-party rule in China remains. New China is still, in significant ways, Old..."
- Museum and Gallery ListingsOctober 31, 2008 By THE NEW YORK TIMES"ART Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. Museums AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM: 'THE SEDUCTION OF LIGHT,' through March 29. Comparisons may be invidious, but they can also be illuminating. Consider this small, tightly focused exhibition of portraits by the 19th-century American..."
Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
