Gilbert & George

Duisburg

Introducing our latest interviewees, Gilbert & George, we announce their current exhibition London Pictures at MKM Küppersmühle Museum of Modern Art.

Brooding and violent, at times absurd and at others disquieting, the London Pictures reveal what might be termed the nervous system of quotidian contemporary society: the impulses, outbursts, sorrows, hopes, temper and desires of daily urban life.

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.

Interview with Gilbert & George

MKM Küppersmühle Museum of Modern Art

March 20 – June 30, 2013
Philosophenweg 55
47051 Duisburg
Germany

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