Gilbert & George As day breaks over us we rise into our vacuum

cm 280 x 315

Gilbert & George began working as an artist duo in 1967 after they met at Saint Martins School of Art in London. Since then, they have been known publically and artistically as “Gilbert & George”, a declaration of their shared art and life and a reflection on the boundaries between public and private and on the identity of the artist in the contemporary world. In their work, they present themselves as a middle-class pair, including in their choice of clothing: their impeccable sartorial style identifies them not as artists but rather as ordinary men, anonymous figures. In a clear sign of detachment from the non-conformist English society of the early years of their activity, Gilbert & George instead chose the markers of normalcy. This apparent conservatism is also highlighted in their choice of drawing technique, the vague lines of which seem to cite 18th century English landscape artists. Their work often references the theme of landscape and figurative art, distancing them from some of the facile experimentalism found in Conceptual Art around the beginning of their career. In 1968, the duo began a project on the artistic value of existence called "Living Sculpture", for which "The General Jungle" serves as a kind of completion while belonging to a larger series of works on paper, "The Charcoal on Paper Sculptures". Gilbert & George drew their own figures, presenting themselves as if they were monumental sculptures in a city park, creating a short circuit between the nature and artifice of landscape and between their life and artistic poetics. All of the works in the MAXXI collection are part of "The General Jungle or Carrying on Sculpting" series, twentythree large-scale drawings analyzing moments over the course of a day describing and exploring the function of artists and their usefulness in contemporary society.

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A conversation between Gilbert and George and Démosthène Davvetas, in Gilbert and George. The Charcoal on Paper Sculptures 1970-1974, exhibition catalogue (Bordeaux, CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux), Bordeaux 1986, pp. 13-15. C. Ratcliff (ed.), Gilbert & George. La trame et l’étoffe de leur monde, in Gilbert & George. The complete pictures 1971-1985, exhibition catalogue (Bordeaux, CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux), Munich 1986, p. 65. M. Kramer, Gilbert & George scultori, in P. Colombo (ed.), Gilbert & George. The General Jungle or Carrying on Sculpting, exhibition catalogue (Rome, MAXXI-Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo), Milan 2005, pp. 49-56. R. Fuchs, Gilbert & George. The complete pictures 1971-2005, London 2007; M. Livingstone, From the heart, in J. Debbaut, B. Borthwick (eds.), Gilbert & George, exhibition catalogue (various venues), London 2007, pp. 12-25.

Foto Roberto Galasso

Purchased from Galleria Massimo Martino, Mendrisio

Drawing