Gilbert and George Exhibit their Works at Arndt as Part of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2011

BERLIN.- Arndt presents the second solo exhibition with Gilbert & George featuring the new series The Urethra Postcard Art.

In 2009, nearly four decades after their first exhibition of POSTCARD ART, and twenty years since their last group of pictures to be made in the medium of postcards, Gilbert & George returned to the form to make the epic and dazzling group of 564 new pieces that comprise The Urethra Postcard Pictures. This is the single largest group of art works made by Gilbert & George, and in turn comprises seven individual groups of new Postcard Pictures. Arndt will exhibit 52 of these works.

British artist duo Gilbert (L) and George pose with one of to their works at the gallery Arndt in Berlin, Germany, 28 April 2011. Gilbert and George are presenting their artworks at the seventh Gallery Weekend that takes place between 29 April and 01 May 2011 and features 44 participating galleries. EPA/JOERG CARSTENSEN.

The art of Gilbert & George has always described, with utmost clarity, poignancy and intensity, the unifying experiences of being alive in the modern world. The artists have addressed those subjects that are seldom considered within the language and focus of contemporary art and culture: that which is lowly, discarded, hidden, quotidian, awkward, confrontational, unfashionable, volatile, isolated or left un-regarded.

The Urethra Postcard Pictures reveal Gilbert & George at their most intent and artistically all seeing. These new pieces are united, compositionally, by their elements comprising “an angulated version of the sign of urethra “. This shape – a continuous rectangle of cards, with a single card in its central space – mimics the sexual symbol used by the one time theosophist C. W. Leadbetter (1853 – 1934) to accompany his signature, and as such proposes that this group of new art works is infused with a still confrontational libertarianism.

Advancing their long-standing engagement with commercially manufactured images and texts – including in this case, picture postcards, telephone box cards and flyers – Gilbert & George describe, in The Urethra Postcard Pictures, both a modern urban world and a sexual society that is covert or marginalised within that world. In this group of pictures, prostitution and sexually transmitted disease (for example) are treated with precisely the same sense of scale, as aesthetic and compositional language, nationhood and civic identity. The Urethra Postcard Pictures affirm themes that Gilbert & George have addressed throughout their art, and most recently in such groups as The New Horny Pictures and The Jack Freak Pictures. In their sheer visual intensity, the extremism of their language, and above all the forceful unity of their composition, The Urethra Postcard Pictures both extend the Postcard Art of Gilbert & George as a specific form, and comprise one of the most powerful, mesmeric, and intensely conceived and created groups of art works that the artists have ever made. –Michael Bracewell (from: The Complete Postcard Art of Gilbert & George, Prestel 2011)

A new double volume publication, reproducing the entire Postcard Art works created by Gilbert & George, with an essay by Michael Bracewell, is published by Prestel to accompany the exhibition. Gilbert was born in the Dolomites, Italy in 1943; George was born in Devon in 1942. Both live and work in London. In 1967 Gilbert & George met at St. Martin’s School of Art in Anthony Caro’s sculpture class. They have lived and worked together in London ever since. The duo has accumulated a long list of international distinctions and exhibitions at major institutions. They were awarded the Turner Prize in 1986, a prize they had already been nominated for two years earlier, and represented the UK at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005. Recently, their second retrospective was staged at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2008/09), the Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2007), and the Tate Modern, London (2007). Further solo exhibitions have been held at the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2006), Serpentine Gallery, London (2002), Kunstmuseum Bonn (1999), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris (1997), National Art Gallery, Beijing (1993), the Secession, Vienna (1992), Guggenheim Museum, New York (1985), and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1971 und 1996).

A touring exhibition of the Jack Freak Pictures is taking place at the following venues: Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (24.02.– 22.05.2011); Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria (17.06.– 09.10.2011); Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, Poland (10.11.2011– Feb. 2012).

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