The legendary artist duo Gilbert & George have announced their first ever exhibition in Australasia, Gilbert & George: The Art Exhibition, opens at the Museum of Old and New Art on 28 November 2015.
This will be a major retrospective, including pictures spanning five decades; dating from 1970 to most recent pictures of 2014. Curated by Mona’s Co-Directors of Exhibitions, Nicole Durling and Olivier Varenne together with Gilbert & George, the pictures will be exhibited across the entirety of Mona’s touring galleries.
“We are coming all the way from London to celebrate the first exhibition of our pictures in Australasia, at the wonderful Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania,” Gilbert & George announced via video from their home studio in London.
“Our pictures deal with the great universals: death, hope, life, fear, sex, money, race and religion. Seeing is believing. See for yourself: Gilbert & George: The Art Exhibition. This is your very first – and last – chance to see one hundred of our pictures.”
Since first meeting at St Martin’s school of Art, London, in 1967, Gilbert & George have lived and worked together as one single and fiercely independent artist, dedicated solely to the creation of their art. They have no allegiance to any other trend, school, movement, doctrine, theory or style of art. Gilbert & George already knew that they were seeking for a form of art that was to them entirely rooted in the real world – in the streets and clamour and traffic and buildings and hearts of strangers: an “Art For All”. Today, their art continues to be multi-allusive, contemporary and contentious, as their subject is literally at their feet – along countless streets, the thoroughfares of the passage of millions of lives, and dense with the sedimentary tracings of social existence.