OSGEMEOS have worked together since they were boys on the streets of Cambuci, their neighbourhood in São Paulo, Brazil, where they created their own pictorial language as a novel way to play and communicate. They let their private universe overflow into a variety of artistic media—painting (including murals on building walls or abandoned doors as well as works on panel and canvas), drawing, sculpture, installation, public art and video art.
Their works portray surreal settings with an otherworldly aesthetic, addressing topics such as dreams, family, and popular and contemporary elements of Brazilian culture, and they are influenced by New York street art and the culture and music of São Paulo in the early 1980s.
The Pandolfo brothers’ work is characterised by the use of patterns, bright colours, textures and the presence of yellow-skinned human figures with elongated limbs that represent a criticism of the political and social inequalities of their native Brazil.
The yellow skin colour, a symbol of their personal signature, has a universal quality and does not represent one particular ethnicity or culture, so that anyone can identify with the characters featured in these artists’ creations. Their subjects tend to be working women, immigrants, labourers or children.
Although they have many sources of inspiration, including graffiti, cinema, dance and music, the artists’ visual language is always riddled with autobiographical allusions to their family, their travels and the fantasy realm they call “Tritrez”, where their characters dwell.
The twins’ creative process starts with drawing: sketching as one mind, one picks up where the other leaves off until their ideas begin to take shape on the blank page. They usually paint side by side, or one brother finishes what the other has begun.
Certain works denote the influence of the Op art surfaces and deceptive perspectives of Victor Vasarely and Frank Stella: in Prisma Dejavú / Déja Vu Prism (2022), a juggler balances on tear-shaped pieces, and in The Fishing Man (2017), the protagonist seems to fish in a universe bursting with colours.
Recurring themes like the importance of origins, roots, migration, popular imagery, dreams and personal dignity surface in Todo dia na mesma hora, no mesmo lugar (2006), a musical street performance; Sem título (2007), a man wearing a fish jumper caught on a little girl’s line; La Familia (2008), a typical family scene in the streets of Brazil; How many rivers we have to cross (2011), where one of their characters shares his body with a fantastic creature halfway between land and water; and O Pescador Vagalume / The Fisherman Firefly (2021), a couple formed by a firefly-fisherman and a mermaid aboard a boat.
Music is also a constant in their work, faithfully reflecting popular customs and festivals: in A caixa de música / The music box (2015), the woman perched on the box wears a hat shaped like a crescent moon; in A vida é uma música onde você dança do seu jeito / Life is a song in which you dance your own way (2022), one figure plays the guitar while the other dances like a marionette; and in O canto do pássaro / The bird’s song (2022), a man with a turntable plays what might be birdsong.
The new installation One World, One Voice (2022), made specifically for the CAC Málaga exhibition, consists of 40 speaker boxes made to resemble the heads of their yellow characters, whose open mouths play a list of songs selected by the artists.
The most recent compositions of OSGEMEOS alternate between characters, architecture, sacred geometry, landscape, figure and ground, inner and outer world. The humans in these works are often women engaged in some activity, like the graceful figure balancing on the bow of a boat in The Sun’s Friend (2019), or the women perched on windowsills in When the leaves turn yellow (2018) and O ninho / The nest (2022), inviting viewers to venture into a new reality. Introspection and psychoanalysis permeate several works: the woman in Vagalume / Firefly (2022) looks like the goddess of some fortress; Aquarium (2019) depicts a figure in a marine environment trapped inside a glass bottle; and in O amor atemporal / The timeless love (2022), a woman is on a boat with a large clock that seems to be telling her time is running out.
OSGEMEOS playfully defy the conventions of space and the conventional figure-ground relationship, as in No canto do pensamento/ In the corner of the mind (2022), where a sculpture-like head shelters a woman, or Vagalume / Firefly (2022), where the protagonist’s garments double as fortifications.
As children, identical twins Otávio and Gustavo Pandolfo (São Paulo, Brazil, 1974), now internationally known as OSGEMEOS, devised a unique way of playing and communicating through art, and in the 1980s, thanks to the influence of Brazilian culture and hip hop, they began using art as a means of sharing their dynamic, magical universe with the public. They have been expressing themselves through graffiti since 1986.
Major solo exhibitions include In the Corner of the Mind, Lehmann Maupin, London (2022); OSGEMEOS: Segredos (Secrets), Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil (2021); OSGEMEOS: Segredos, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo (2020); In Between, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville (2019); Déja Vu, Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong (2018); Silence of the Music, Lehmann Maupin, New York (2016); A ópera da lua, Galeria Fortes Villaça, São Paulo (2014); Os Gemeos, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2012); Fermata, Museu Vale, Espírito Santo, Brazil (2011); Pra quem mora lá, o céu é lá, Museu Colecção Berardo – Arte Moderna e Contemporânea, Lisbon (2010); Vertigem, Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil (2008); As Flores deste Jardim meus Avós Plantaram, Museum Het Domein Sittard, Sittard, Netherlands (2007); O peixe que comia estrelas cadentes, Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo (2006); and Pavil, Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco (2003).
Some of their most important projects have been the Reborn Art Festival in Ishinomaki, Japan (2022); the mural at Cardozo High School in Queens, New York (2022); the Flying Pictures project at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2019); the hip hop tribute murals on 14th Street in New York (2017); HangarBicocca, Milan (2016); Better Out Than In: Banksy and OSGEMEOS, High Line, New York, and painting a Boeing 737-800 for Gol Linhas Aéreas, Brazil (both in 2014); Parallel Connection for Times Square Arts: Midnight Moment, New York (2015); Wynwood Walls, Miami (2009); Tate Modern, London (2008); and Creative Time, New York (2005).
Their work can be found in various public collections and institutions, such as The Franks-Suss Collection (London), Museu de Arte Moderna (São Paulo), Museu de Arte Brasileira (São Paulo), Museu Casa do Pontal (Rio de Janeiro), Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo Art Museum (Tokyo), and Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico), among others.