Gilbert & George

New York City

For their first gallery exhibition in New York since The Perversive Pictures, 2004, Lehmann Maupin and Sonnabend present London Pictures. These monumental pictures with titles such as ‚Arrested‘, ‚Attacked Straight‘, ‚Bomb‘, ‚Lover‘, ‚Missing‘, ‚Suicide‘, take their names from newspaper posters and as a whole, portray the sorrow and humanity of western city life.

Gilbert & George have described in several interviews how London, its grandeur, mystery and drama has been a major inspiration of their determinedly confrontational and richly atmospheric art for nearly five decades. Over this period, Gilbert & George have shadowed London’s moods, identifying within the city’s sleepless thoroughfares all of the messy, precious, undeniable aspects of the modern human condition.

These 292 new London Pictures enable the city to speak for itself, in the language of 3712 newspaper posters, stolen/retrieved, one by one by the artists themselves for more than 6 years, and then sorted and classified by them according to subject. This method, in the words of the artist, allows each picture to „decide itself“ – its subject, title and size determined and denoted alphabetically and numerically by the findings of the classification process. In this, Gilbert & George have sought to eliminate the conscious act of „art-making,“ asserting instead the reality, as reported by the print news media of London, that lies at the heart of their subject: the routine volatility of contemporary society. Behind each poster, however blunt or abbreviated, lies the truth and inviolable realism of a human situation, its impact and consequences. It is this truth that Gilbert & George have described as the „moral dimension“ that they must identify within a subject before they can engage with it within their art.

Lehmann Maupin Gallery

April 26th – June 23rd, 2012
540 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001
USA

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