GILBERT & GEORGE
London Pictures

23 March – 30 May 2012
Opening: 22 March from 3 – 6 p.m.
The artist will be present.

ARNDT Berlin is proud to present its inaugural exhibition of 'LONDON PICTURES' by Gilbert & George. This monumental body of 292 pictures is the largest series yet created by the acclaimed British artists. 19 pictures will be shown in Berlin.

For five decades, to international acclaim, Gilbert & George have been making art that is visionary, shocking, relentless, moral and richly atmospheric.

In these new ‘LONDON PICTURES’ (2011) Gilbert & George present an epic survey of modern urban life in all its volatility, tragedy, absurdity and routine violence. Brutal and declamatory, these brooding and disquieting pictures have been created from the sorting and classification by subject of nearly 4000 newspaper headline posters, stolen by the artists over a number of years. In their lucidity, no less than their insight into the daily realities of metropolitan life, the ‘LONDON PICTURES’ are Dickensian in scope and ultra-modern in sensibility.

Drawing directly on the quotidian life of a vast city, the ‘LONDON PICTURES’ allow contemporary society to recount itself in its own language. Within the townscape of this moral audit, Gilbert & George appear to pass like ghosts and seers, alternately watchful and distracted, as though their spirits were haunting the very streets and buildings that these pictures describe. The ‘LONDON PICTURES’ seem to comprise a great visual novel, revealing without judgment the ceaseless relay of urban drama, in all its gradations of hope and suffering.
Michael Bracewell, 2012

Gilbert was born in the Dolomites, Italy in 1943; George was born in Devon in 1942 and both live and work in London. Together they have participated in many important group and solo exhibitions including 51st International Venice Biennale (2005), Turner Prize (1984) and Carnegie International (1985). They have had extensive solo exhibitions, including Whitechapel Gallery (1971-1972), National Gallery, Beijing (1993), Shanghai Art Museum (1993), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1995-1996), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998), Serpentine Gallery, London (2002), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2002), Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2004-2005), Tate Modern, London, Haus der Kunst, Munich (both 2007), Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art (both 2008), ‘Jack Freak Pictures’, CAC Malaga, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels (all 2010), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Kunstmuseum Linz (both 2011) and Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk (2011-2012).

A catalogue documenting all 292 of the ‘LONDON PICTURES’ with an essay by Michael Bracewell will accompany the exhibition.

Gilbert & George will attend the press preview and the opening of the exhibition.

For further information, please contact:
Lisa Polten
0049 30 206 138 70
lisa at arndtberlin dot com

13.06.–18.09.2009
Gilbert & George
JACK FREAK PICTURES
Solo exhibtion at Arndt & Partner, Berlin

PRESS RELEASE
As the international tour of the last Gilbert & George retrospective (2007–2009) did not include Berlin, Arndt & Partner are now all the more delighted to present a solo exhibition of the celebrity artist duo in its gallery rooms behind the Hamburger Bahnhof. It is the first Gilbert & George solo show in Berlin for 14 years. The exhibition features a selection of 20 large-scale pieces from the Jack Freak Pictures, the largest Gilbert & George group of pictures to date. The thrust of the content is given by the colors and shapes of the Union Jack flag that dominate the bulk of the pictures as well as the recurring motive of medals, emblems and trees. In the Jack Freak Pictures the artist duo explores aspects of nationhood and of the sentient individual in the nets of society. In his essay published in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition the British writer Michael Bracewell describes these pictures as “the most iconic, philosophically astute and visually violent works that Gilbert & George have ever created...”
Gilbert & George, who met as students of sculpture at St. Martin’s School of Art in London 42 years ago, embarked on a joint artistic career that was to encompass a wide range of media from drawing to video and their trademark pictures. Further, the pair revolutionized the concept of sculpture by presenting themselves as “living sculptures” dressed in the quintessentially British tailored suit, shirt and tie. But it was their monumental trademark pictures composed of a grid-like array of smaller images which they began to create in the early 70s that first brought them international fame. Figures, cityscapes, symbols, plants, bodily fluids, excrements and text interlock in pictorial messages as visually powerful as their content is provocative. The pictures, which started out in black and white and later assumed increasingly luminous, bold colors, generally also depict portraits of the artists themselves and seize on taboo subjects like sexuality, race, religion and national identity with a brash and fearless candor.
The Jack Freak Pictures again feature the bodies and/or faces of the artists. In these compositions, their bodies function as stylized representatives of the individual in society, whose relationship to social norms and categories, to national, religious and sexual identification processes is relentlessly explored and commented upon. Departing from their earlier oeuvre, some of their new pictures split the raw images into much smaller fragments before merging them into new forms.
The result is a fascinating kaleidoscopic mix of the monstrously grotesque with an intricate ornamental structure reminiscent of sacred art. In ever new variations, Gilbert & George order the signs and fragments of social life they find in their neighborhood – the multicultural East End of London –, where solidarity and friendship are as visible as intolerance and marginalization.
A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Michael Bracewell will be published by the Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, to accompany the exhibition.
GILBERT & GEORGE
Gilbert, born in 1943 in the Ladin Dolomites, Italy, studied at the Wolkenstein School of Art in South Tyrol, the Hallein School of Art in Austria and the Munich Academy of Fine Arts before coming to London and enrolling at St Martin’s School of Art. George, born in 1942 in Devon, England, studied at the Dartington Hall College of Art, the Oxford Art School and St. Martin’s School of Art, where he met Gilbert in Anthony Caro’s sculpture class in 1967. 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. Solo exhibitions of their art have been held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1971 and 1996), the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1985), Wiener Secession, Vienna (1992), the National Art Gallery, Beijing (1993), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris (1997), the Kunstmuseum Bonn (1999), the Serpentine Gallery, London (2002), and the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2006). Their second retrospective, which toured museums including the Tate Modern, London (2007), and the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2007), was on show at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, until the beginning of the year.

30.04. - 27.08.2011
THE URETHRA POSTCARD ART OF GILBERT & GEORGE
Solo exhibition at ARNDT, Berlin

 THE URETHRA POSTCARD ART OF GILBERT & GEORGE
 

POSTCARD PIECES / FLYER PICTURES and LONDON TELEPHONE BOX PICTURES
Nearly four decades after their first exhibition of Postcard Art, and twenty years after their last group of pictures made of selected postcards, Gilbert & George returned to this medium to make an extensive group of 564 new pieces. Typical postcard topics such as the Union Flag, landscapes, the Royal Family and tourist destinations, are complimented by telephone box cards and flyers, which are mainly focusing on prostitution. 52 pictures from this single largest group of art works by Gilbert & George will be exhibited at ARNDT Berlin from 29 April 2011.

A two-volume set catalogue published by Prestel illustrates all 1.004 new "The Urethra Postcard Pictures" and early Postcard Pictures (1972–1989), most of which have not yet been catalogued or exhibited before.

Michael Bracewell describes the significance of this body of work in his contribution for the catalogue as follows: “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 artworks that the artists have ever made.”
Further available works here.

PALINDROME: Gilbert & George I Jitish Kallat

24 October 2013 - 19 December 2013
Opening: 23 October 2013, 5 pm – 10 pm on the occasion of the opening of the
Center of Contemporary Art (CCA) at Gillman Barracks

In the exhibition titled Palindrome, ARNDT brings together four artworks into conversation, two each by Gilbert and George and Jitish Kallat. Generationally far apart and geographically distant their art is often informed by the cities where they live; the quotidian and the unexceptional become the ground for playful and probing investigations. 
As with a ‘Palindrome’, where a text may be read the same way in either forward or reverse direction, the four pictures in the exhibition unfold in symmetry. For instance in ‘LIFE STRAIGHT’ from the remarkable ‘London Pictures’, Gilbert and George classify 4000 newspaper clipping based on a repeated key word ‘life’, their often shocking and contradictory recurrence create dense narratives overlaid on disintegrating self-portraits of the artists; their vigilant eyes penetrating these complex chronicles. In Kallat’s paintings a person might read a newspaper while criss-crossing zippers, evoking topographical views of street-maps or railway tracks, unveil an overcast sky, elsewhere a daily commute becomes the site for the celestial and the uncanny to dishevel the habitual. In Kallat’s paintings layered with varied references, a photographic image often acts as a trigger to proliferate the picture plane with stories; In Gilbert and George the grandeur and grammar of history painting is re-invented through the format of photography.
‘Palindrome’ animates the many formal and thematic overlaps between two artists in whose work the picture plane becomes a resourceful ground to fashion a vision of the world.

Parallel to the exhibition in the gallery, in the viewing room we present a selection of „Selfportraits“ by Gilbert & George, Sophie Calle, Joe Coleman, Maha Malluh, Mike Parr, Ariadhitya Pramuhendra and Agus Suwage.

ARNDT Singapore
Gallery Opening hours: Wed – Sat, 11am – 7pm / Sun, 11am – 6pm
Contact: Mariko Owen, Mariko@arndtberlin.com

Jitish Kallat
born in 1974 in Mumbai, India
lives and works in Mumbai

Jitish Kallat is one of the most exciting and dynamic Asian artists to have received international recognition in recent years. Working across a variety of media including painting, sculpture, photography and installation, his work reflects a deep involvement with the city of his birth (Mumbai) and derives much of its visual language from his immediate urban environment. His subject matter has been described previously as 'the dirty, old, recycled and patched-together fabric of urban India'. Wider concerns include India's attempts to negotiate its entry into a globalised economy, addressing housing and transportation crises, city planning, caste and communal tensions, and government accountability.

Many of Kallat's works focus on Mumbai's downtrodden or dispossessed inhabitants, though treating them in a bold, colourful and highly graphic manner. Kallat traditionally mounts his paintings on bronze sculptures that are re-created from the wall adornments found on the 120-year-old Victoria Terminus train station in the centre of Mumbai.

“The city street is my university. One finds all the themes of life and art – pain, happiness, anger, violence and compassion – played out here in full volume. Scale is merely one of the many tools one can deploy in the creation of meaning, and decisions such as big, small, lifesize, etc., are as much acts of meaning creation as they may be retinal or aesthetic considerations.”
Jitish Kallat, quoted in The Asian Art Newspaper, February 2010

CV
Jitish Kallat participated all major shows about Indian art: “India: Art Now” at Arken Museum, Ishoij, Denmark, 2012-13, “Indian Highway IV”, MAXXI, 2012, Rome, Italy and in Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon, 2011, Lyon, France “The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today,” Saatchi Gallery, London (2010), “Chalo! India: A New Era of Indian Art,” Essl Museum – Contemporary Art, Klosterneuburg, Austria, and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (both 2009), as well as “Indian Highway,” Serpentine Gallery, London (2008/09). Solo presentations include "Circa" at Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (2012), "Public Notice 3" at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2010); "Likewise" at Arndt and Partner, Berlin (2010); "The Astronomy of the Subway" at Haunch of Venison, London (2010); Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (2008), „Die Tropen. Ansichten von der Mitte der Weltkugel“, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2008), The 6th Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, Korea (2006), “Indian Summer”, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2005 ) and the Kunsthalle Luckenwalde, Germany (1998).


Gilbert & George

Gilbert was born in 1943 in Dolomites, Italy
George was born in 1942 in Devon, UK
They both live and work in collaboration in London

Gilbert & George have long since been acknowledged icons of contemporary art.
In 1967 they met as students at St Martin's School of Art in London. By 1969 they were reacting against approaches to sculpture then dominant at St Martin's, which they regarded as elitist and poor at communicating outside an art context. Their strategy was to make themselves into sculpture, so sacrificing their separate identities to art and turning the notion of creativity on its head. Working as a pair and presenting themselves as ‘living sculpture’, incorporating themselves into their art, setting out to provoke their viewers, making them think and question conventions and taboos.
In 1971 Gilbert & George made their first ‘photo-pieces', which remained their dominant form of expression. They gradually shifted the emphasis of their subject-matter away from their own experiences of life. Instead they concentrated on the inner-city reality that confronted them on the street and on the structures and feelings that inform life such as religion, class, royalty, sex, hope, nationality, death, identity, politics and fear.
In their new LONDON PICTURES Gilbert & George present an epic survey (292 pictures) of modern urban life in all its volatility, tragedy, absurdity and routine violence. Brutal and declamatory, these brooding and disquieting pictures have been created from the sorting and classification by subject of nearly 4000 newspaper headline posters, stolen by the artists over a number of years.

CV
Gilbert & George have participated in many important group and solo exhibitions including 51st International Venice Biennale (2005), Turner Prize (1984) and Carnegie International (1985). They have had extensive solo exhibitions, including Whitechapel Gallery (1971-1972), National Gallery, Beijing (1993), Shanghai Art Museum (1993), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1995-1996), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998), Serpentine Gallery, London (2002), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2002), Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2004-2005), Tate Modern, London, Haus der Kunst, Munich (both 2007), Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art (both 2008), ‘Jack Freak Pictures’, CAC Malaga, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels (all 2010), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Kunstmuseum Linz (both 2011) and Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk (2011-2012). The "London Pictures" have been on exhibited at Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg (2013) and Casal Solleric, Mallorca, Spain (2013).

GILBERT & GEORGE

UTOPIAN PICTURES

Solo exhibition at ARNDT Singapore
January 19 - April 12, 2015

Opening | Monday | January 19, 2015 from 6 - 9 pm | at ARNDT Singapore

ARNDT is pleased to present the first exhibition of Gilbert & George in Singapore. Gilbert & George created 26 new artworks, the UTOPIAN PICTURES, for their first solo exhibition in Singapore and Southeast-Asia.

Since first meeting at St Martin’s School of Art, London, in 1967, Gilbert & George have dedicated their lives to creating art that communicates their vision of the world in a manner that is direct, immediate, open-handed, mysterious, confrontational, generous, dizzying, ghost-like, intensely realistic, visionary and profoundly moral.
With a many layered intensity of thoughts and a radically inventive visual creativity, the art of Gilbert & George has always directly addressed the feelings, prejudices and emotions of each individual viewer.
The twenty-six UTOPIAN PICTURES, exhibited for the first time in the iconic Gillman Barracks, convey the moral vision of Gilbert & George with monolithic and declamatory intensity. These pictures depict a modern world in which authority and the resentment of authority, rules and rebellion, advertising and public information, dogma and warning, boasts and threats co-exist in seemingly endless proclamations: in notices and signs, on the streets and on public transport, in historic royal emblems, stickers, posters and graffiti. Religion, politics, sex, crime and civic order are all represented – the myriad announcements combining to resemble a roaring visual Babel within the public spaces of the contemporary city.
Gilbert & George have always asserted that the modern human condition, in all its aspects, can be found revealed in the streets around their home and studio in East London. The texts and emblems contained in the UTOPIAN PICTURES provide further proof of this claim. Encountered by the artists in their daily walks around their neighbourhood, the many different signs depicted in these pictures – some attempting to exercise social control, others to assert civic disobedience – take their place within the art of Gilbert & George as a pre-existing visual language that is real and alive on the city streets. A highly inventive and original visual vocabulary embellishes the dense webs of personal, moral and ideological tension that these signs and slogans create. Possessing a universality of content, temper and meaning, they describe the social climate of modern urban life.
In seemingly simple, vivid primary colours, the figures of the artists often masked, hooded or obscured, yet always quietly and respectably be-suited, the UTOPIAN PICTURES convey the experience of an accelerated, violent, vertiginous, clamorous, technological, multi-faith and multi-cultural teeming city. It is within this very clamour – this dissonant roar of conflicting intentions and ideals – that we might in fact discern ‘Utopia’: a society describing perfection through its allowance of imperfection and disorder.

Michael Bracewell

ARNDT Singapore
Gillman Barracks
9 Lock Road #03-21
Singapore 108937
Tel. +65 67340775

WORK LIST | Please click here to see the complete list of works

VIDEOS
VIDEO I | LASALLE COLLEGE OF THE ARTS in conversation with Gilbert & George

VIDEO II | TONY ELLWOOD in conversation with G & G on the occasion of ART IN MOTION Artweek Singapore

PRESS
MONOPOL - January,  2015
HARPER'S ART BAZAAR - December, 2014
THE STRAITS TIME - January, 2015
ARTSY - February, 2015

MERCHANDISING PRODUCTS | UTOPIAN PICTURES by Gilbert & George

UTOPIAN PICTURES merchandising products by Gilbert and George

SPECIAL EVENTS
GILBERT & GEORGE BOOK-SIGNING | ART STAGE SINGAPORE
A catalogue documenting the UTOPIAN PICTURES will accompany the exhibition at ARNDT Singapore.
Meet the artists at ART STAGE SINGAPORE for the book signing of UTOPIAN PICTURES.

When: Wednesday 21.01.2015 from 4 - 6 pm | Booth E13
Venue: Marina Bay Sands Convention Center | 10 Bayfront Avenue | Singapore 018956

LASALLE PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES | IN CONVERSATION WITH GILBERT & GEORGE
For the first time in Singapore, Gilbert & George will discuss and share insights into their art and life. Audiences will have the unique opportunity to hear from these media shy artists first hand, and meet them in person. The session will be hosted by British novelist Michael Bracewell.

When: Thursday 22.01.2015 from 7 – 9:30 pm (including refreshments)
Venue: The Singapore Airlines Theatre | LASALLE College of the Arts (Basement) | 1 McNally Street | Singapore 187940

Free admission but pre-booking is required. Please reserve your seat at https://www.eventbrite.sg/

ART BASEL HONG KONG 2015 - March 15 - 17, 2015

ARNDT is pleased to announce its participation at Art Basel Hong Kong 2015, taking place from March 15 - 17. We are looking forward to welcoming you at our BOOTH Hall 3 C30.

Participating Artists: Jumaldi Alfi, Stephan Balkenhol, Jigger Cruz, Wim Delvoye, Gilbert & George, Yang Jiechang, Heinz Mack, Rudi Mantofani, Vik Muniz, Eko Nugroho, Norberto Roldan, Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo, Rodel Tapaya and Qiu Zhijie.

Please click here to see a preliminary list of the exhibited artworks

Venue:
Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre
1 Harbour Road
Wan Chai, Hong Kong

ARNDT Berlin
Potsdamer Strasse 96
10785 Berlin
info@arndtberlin.com