Latest news with #Gilbert&George
Time Out
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Fake Barn Country
At first, this show seems distinctly uninviting to anyone not deeply in the fold with today's art scene. It fills three floors with austere works by artists I mostly haven't heard of. Found objects, subtle installations and elliptical messages abound here; it's enough to draw a groan from any contemporary art cynic. In the first room, dodging between Gilli Tal's installation of looming streetlamps and hearing what sounds like an urban field recording by Solomon Garçon, you might feel like you're navigating a party full of strangers. No artwork is given any context beyond a spreadsheet-like booklet containing the artist's biographical details and the artwork's medium, date of creation and exhibition history. That last, seemingly unimportant detail brings the show to life. Reading through the handout's fourth column, you'll see the names of a number of grassroots artist-run exhibition spaces. Almost every artist in the show has been involved in or shown their work at such a venue. Many are now defunct and I'm sure none were ever as well-appointed as this gallery. It is this detail – call it the show's DIY-pedigree – that animates Fake Barn Country. This is an exhibition about exhibitions This is an exhibition about exhibitions and about exhibition-making as an act of passion, generosity and curiosity shared between artists. Every image, sound and object here is like a mushroom grown from a vast, international and intergenerational network of mutual support and encouragement that expands far beyond this gallery's walls. In a world of superstar artists and mega-dealers, it's easy to forget that iconoclastic (and, all too often, transient) spaces like the ones celebrated here are where art really happens. They are incubators for novel ideas and radical projects. Yes, their content can be esoteric and alienating, but that's because they're doing something new, prizing imagination over accessibility. These aren't shiny, colourful, above-the-sofa abstract paintings because this isn't a commercial gallery; it's the nexus of an ongoing artist-to-artist dialogue. The exhibition contains more than a few moments of brilliance that you don't need to be in the know to appreciate. Highlights include Kitty Kraus' suspended Lidl trolley handlebar that spins antically in front of a first-floor mirror, Yuki Kimura's crystalline Russian doll-like arrangement of three cognac glasses and a monumental work by Gilbert & George whose exhibition history fills a whole page. Their gallery, the Gilbert & George Centre, is just down the road in Spitalfields. On the top floor is a sculpture by Stuart Middleton that extends across two rooms. It's a horizontal totem made up of painted panels, chopping boards, a hatstand, a washing-up bowl, a pair of jeans, a rotary blade and a piggy bank among other things. To get it up here must have been a feat of logistics. Now it stands, a microcosm of the whole exhibition, as a monument to the dogged and generous DIY spirit with which artists mount exhibitions for each other.
South China Morning Post
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
When Brit art world provocateurs Gilbert & George went to China
Published: 2:00pm, 30 Jan 2025 What do you do when you're the two best-known contemporary artists in Britain, you're at the top of your game and you're itching to conquer the international art world? That was the question facing the London-based duo Gilbert & George in 1993, and their answer at the time, however counter-intuitively, was China. The controversial pair had long divided British art critics as to whether they were national treasures or merely, as the London Evening Standard's influential pundit Brian Sewell once declared, 'art world poseurs'. Graduates of the hallowed Saint Martin's School of Art in London, Gilbert & George first appeared as performance artists and living sculptures, before moving on to large-scale photo works designed to shock, depicting racist skinheads, human faeces, nudity and sex acts, often with the duo in the frame themselves, looking on approvingly. The confrontational style was not without precedent. Back in the 1950s and 60s, the School of London – operating mostly from a notoriously seedy Soho – was ruled by Francis Bacon 's violent brushwork, Lucian Freud's explicit male nudes, and the layered, seemingly ad hoc work of Frank Auerbach. In the 80s, Gilbert & George attracted an updated version of that kind of attention. They were gay, living together in an 18th century house in the then-run-down Spitalfields area of East London, always seen smartly dressed in dark suits, sipping tea from china cups or downing G&Ts. They presented conservative, yet their work stunned and divided the art community, leaving as many offended as others were amazed. Works sold for vast sums, and it was hard to find anyone in British art or otherwise who wouldn't recognise the dapper duo on the street. Gilbert & George at the Gilbert & George Centre in London, in 2023. So having secured local star status, they decided to take some of their most notorious pieces on the road, presented on massive canvases and in stained glass, not to Paris or New York, but, inexplicably to those outside their circle, to Beijing and Shanghai. James Birch had trained at Christie's Fine Art before opening his own gallery in 1983 on London's King's Road, specialising in surrealists and the emerging Young British Artists (the infamous YBAs), led by the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin . It was, in fact, Birch's eponymous gallery that gave a young – now Sir – Grayson Perry his first show, in 1984 (and his second, in 1985). Birch was also interested in Russia, and famously organised a late-career show for Bacon at Moscow's Central House of Artists in 1988 (lean times for the Soviets, with one attendee writing in the visitors' book, 'We need bacon, not Francis Bacon'). Birch's memoir of the experience, Bacon in Moscow (2022), is a rollicking tale of the avant garde, communist commissars and a Soviet cultural establishment divided between those terrified of bourgeois Western art and those eager to experience it, all during the dying days of the USSR.
