"It sums up a stillness, a sadness and a romantic passion that breathes in this show but you won't notice it straight away. Instead you'll be carried along in a rush of cheeky provocations and ludicrous juxtapositions of word and image: a joyous embrace of modern life or even, pardon my French, a jouissance. The pictures tower and expand in this perfect brutalist setting as if you're walking through a city of art a dirty, disreputable city."
"Marco. Sexy, horny and waiting, SKINHEAD JOE, 26. East End/10 mins Liverpool St. Administers firm service. Where are they now? Is skinhead Joe running a cafe or is he dead? You find yourself not sniggering but wondering about these young men. It's a slice of life, a montage of transactions, moments, relations of power, desire and money in a metropolis."
Gilbert & George present portraits that combine serene imagery with provocative found language and advertising fragments. Large-scale works place the artists amid graveyards, sex-worker adverts, sensational headlines and clinical phrases, creating contrasts between stillness and urban chaos. The pieces evoke curiosity about individual lives while mapping transactions of desire, money and power across London's streets. Brutalist gallery architecture amplifies the city-like experience of the works. References to Evening Standard headlines and graphic phrases dramatize violence, sex and mortality. The overall tone balances scabrous chronicling, dark humour and a romantic undercurrent.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]