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9/1/2007

Gilbert & George

Faggionato Fine Art, London

Selected works from the 80s

Faggionato Fine Art is pleased to have currently on view: GILBERT & GEORGE -selected works from the 80s.

Since meeting at St Martin’s School of Art in 1967, Gilbert & George have been working together and inventing their own ‘visual language’. Their art is based on the underlying aim to develop a form of representation that is accessible and understood universally by everyone, to create an ‘art for all’.

With the content of mankind as their subject and inspiration, Gilbert & George use art to address fundamental human issues and concerns: sex, death, race, religion, or politics. They create pictures that speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to people about their life, believing that the true function of art is to bring about understanding, progress and advancement in society. Rather than avoid taboo subjects, Gilbert & George confront them head-on, creating works that are an in-your-face attack with notoriously controversial statements and provocative insinuating images.

Gilbert+George blur the boundaries between art and life and life and art, having begun by turning their own lives into a constant performance and becoming the work of art itself as ‘living sculptures’. Though they have since moved into pictures, their persona is ever-present, images of the duo superimposed into nearly all of their photomontage compositions. Obviously and intrinsically linked with the art they create, they expose themselves –sometimes literally – in their pictures.

The works on show range in date from 1980 to 1988, and thus span almost a decade of development in their visual language. Although continuing with the use of black and white photography, divided into panels in rectangular or square grid formation, the 80s saw an onslaught of colour in Gilbert & Georges’ art. Against the strong chiaroscuro contrast of black vs. white, the presence of vivid colour hand-dyed into the photograph is used to stunning, jarring effect. Applied as a chromatic veil as in the work Stink (1986), or clashing emphasis, the strong primary colours enhance the dramatic content of the works (Grounded, 1988), adding greater depth and ambiguity.

Materials never yield to a decorative or naturalistic rendering, but serve solely to underpin the meaning and purpose of the picture. Gilbert & George capture the fundamental essence of what they wish to represent, and establish an iconography in their pictures that opens itself up to an interpretive code. In this way the pictures are like signs, symbolic and easily read. Humorous and subversive (like the work Coming, 1983), amusing and shocking, they communicate on a direct and emotional level. Pwerful, compelling representations, these works are pictures that speak by artists of our time.

Faggionato Fine Art
49 Albemarle Street - London

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