London 1967: two sculpture students meet at St. Martin’s School of Art. From then on, they decide to join their lives and their art in a unique, indissoluble entity. During the subsequent forty years, calling themselves simply Gilbert & George, the two artists investigate the complexity of the human condition.
Sometimes considered provocative, their art addresses controversial issues, such as identity, sexuality, politics, and religion. Conveying the aggressiveness of today’s world and the proliferation of stresses to which the individual is constantly subjected, Gilbert & George often portray each other in their pictures, thereby declaring their vulnerability and fragility.
Offering the public the opportunity to retrace the entire career of these two artists, Gilbert & George: Major Exhibition is the most extensive retrospective of their art that has been organized to date. Conceived by the artists, the installation at Castello di Rivoli includes the second and third floors and delineates an original layout, chronological in part. Although they create all their pictures in thematic groups, each defined by analogous stylistic choices, in this case Gilbert & George have preferred to juxtapose pictures belonging to different groups.
The choice to saturate the space, arranging the pictures according to a dense plan, transforms each room into a large fresco, within which some of the post urgent themes in contemporary discourse appear.
