Brooklyn Museum of Art

CURRENT EXHIBITION

Gilbert and George

October 3, 2008—January 11, 2009

The Brooklyn Museum will be the final venue of an international tour of the first retrospective in more than twenty years of art by the internationally acclaimed artists Gilbert & George. The exhibition comprises more than ninety pictures produced since 1970, among them more than a dozen that will be seen only in the Brooklyn presentation. 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 art. It traces their stylistic and emotional evolution through their pictures and works in other media, ranging from Charcoal on Paper Sculptures from the early 1970s to postcard pieces, to ephemera, dating back to the 1960s. Gilbert and George met in 1967 while students at St. Martin’s Art School in London. They began to create art together, developing a uniquely recognizable style both in their pictures and in their presentations of themselves as living sculptures. Over the forty years they developed a new format that created large-scale pictures, which are visually and emotionally powerful, through a unique creative process. Most of their pictures are created in groups and made especially for the space in which they are first exhibited. The artists’ art, which is sometimes seen as 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 pictures in the exhibition have been loaned from public and private collections in North America and Europe.

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