5 - 13 December 2009

Fortezza da Basso - Florence

With High Patronage

of the President of the Italian Republic

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An Award to Gilbert & George

On the successful wave of their exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London, Gilbert & George will come to Florence together with Tim Marlow, exhibitions director of the White Cube Gallery London, founder of the Tate Magazine, collaborator on Channel Five, where he presents a program on current exhibitions. Tim Marlow has published several books and important artists monographs such as Auguste Rodin and Egon Schiele. He writes for various magazines and newspapers such as The Times, The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, Art Monthly, etc. Gilbert & George will meet the 800 artists participating at the Biennale and visitors to the Biennale, as part of the rich calendar of conferences, meetings, video-projections.
A video-documentary produced by Gilbert & George will be shown during the Florence Biennale and Tim Marlow along with Gilbert & George will give a talk about their life and work.

In Carter Ratcliff's “Gilbert & George: The Complete Pictures 1971- 1985” , ( London , 1986) Gilbert & George stated “We want Our Art to speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to People about their life and not about their knowledge of art... The content of mankind is our subject and our inspiration. We stand each day for good traditions and necessary changes. We want to find and accept all the good and bad in ourselves”.

Gilbert & George met at St Martin's School of Art , London in 1967 and have been one artist ever since exhibiting for the first time together in 1969 at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery London, with “Singing Sculpture”. They referred to themselves not as performance artists but as “Living Sculptures” and their “responsibility suits”, the almost, ill-fitting sixties style suits which have become emblematic of part of their image, were part of the “living sculpture” that they embodied.

In the 1970's Gilbert & George turned towards creating their own black and white photographic images. They almost always depicted themselves in a grid format along with aspects of the east end of London where they live: faces, buildings and graffiti, “Smash the Reds”, 1977 or “Bummed”, 1977 where there is also a political aspect and the important introduction of the colour red. In “Prick Ass”, 1977 film clips of a homeless alcoholic are inserted into the multi part image: this interrelationship with people and architecture stress the images of anger, loneliness and destruction and are further highlighted by this use of red.

In the 1980's where their subject matter expanded to include sex, religion, nature, fear, racial differences and politics, their sumptuous works became brightly multi-coloured. They once stated “when we are working we have our brain, our soul and our sex. These are the things that we work with. Sometimes we do a picture more for sex, sometimes more for our brain and sometimes more for our spirit. It's always with a combination of those three that we work. The whole of civilisation continues because of those driving forces”. (Ratcliff, “Gilbert and George: The Complete Pictures 1971- 1985” , London, 1986). Indeed, these photographic works continue to be placed within a framed grid, which lends to convey the image more forcefully to the viewer. The idea of natural division in the world is important to the artists who, when talking about the grid aspect of their works, have given the examples of house being made up of bricks or a week of days.

Gilbert & George represented Great Britain at the Biennale di Venezia in 2005 with a new group of paintings, “Thirteen Hooligan Pictures” (2004) and Perversive Pictures (2004). Indeed “Six Bomb Pictures: Terror” their most recent work from 2006 continues to affront current affairs and political issues.

Such is Gilbert & George's commitment to their art that they have continued to adopt this persona of living art in their everyday lives: in their normal but formal way of dressing, their name and address being in the phone book, they are thought to have been seen on the London bus, in their measured formality, aspects that in today's celebrities you rarely see.