Gilbert & George, The General Jungle or Carrying on Sculpting (Installation View), all images courtesy Lévy Gorvy

Now through November 18, Lévy Gorvy’s London exhibition space is hosting The General Jungle or Carrying on Sculpting, a collection of seminal works by artist duo Gilbert & George. This show is comprised of 23 monumental, multi-panel pieces, one of the first manifestations of Gilbert & George’s ‘Art for All’ manifesto, and a landmark entry in their early collaborations, which began fifty years ago this month. This is the first exhibition in the United Kingdom to feature this body of work, first presented at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in the early 1970’s. (more…)

Lawrence Weiner, NAU EM I ART BILONG YUMI (The art of today belongs to us) (1988–2016), via Art Observed

Originally on view at the Monnaie de Paris, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Jens Hoffmann’s curatorial project Take Me I’m Yours has touched down at the Jewish Museum.  Bringing together a body of works centered around portability, consumption and distribution, everything on the show can be interacted with or taken by the viewer in some way, allowing the viewer to build up a collection of small-scale works and pieces from a single show.

Yoko Ono, Air Dispenser (1971), via Art Observed

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Gilbert and George are interviewed in a short video by Art Info this week, discussing their opening retrosecptive at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania, and their perspective on making and showing work.  “We believe that we are all part of a great big Western triumph, but we want to take things forward,” the duo says. “We realized that people were using taste and preferences in art as a weapon against people they believed to be socially or educationally inferior to them.” (more…)

Gilbert and George are profiled in The Guardian this week, as the pair open a new show of works at White Cube, featuring cryptically inscribed banner works with texts like “Fuck the Planet,” which the artist’s argue carry parallel meanings.  “We need to just leave nature alone,” says George. “Human beings should only be in the city because it makes them freer and more tolerant than the ones isolated on top of the mountain.”  Gilbert agrees: “It’s the same as the love of God, who is just another dictator.” (more…)

Artists Gilbert and George are interviewed in the Wall Street Journal this week, discussing their most recent exhibition at White Cube, Scapegoating Pictures for London. “We thought it strange that the world’s governments, churches, mosques and schools are all confronting the issue of Islamist fervor, but the world’s artists aren’t touching it,” says George Passmore. “We try to create art we feel the world need.” (more…)

Gilbert & George, The World of Gilbert and George (still) (1981), all images courtesy Lehmann Maupin

On view at Lehmann Maupin New York is a group of films and “Living Sculptures” by the 1986 Turner Prize winners Gilbert & George. The exhibition is the artists’ fifth show with Lehmann Maupin, and represents a transitional link between their early pieces and their later, better known large-scale works.

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The Guardian has published a lengthy piece on the role of the artist’s assistant, and assistant’s often ignored contributions to the work of major artists.  The piece features an interview with Jake and Dinos Chapman, who recall their early work as assistants to Gilbert and George.  ‘It was hard labour by any measure,” says Jake Chapman.  “There was absolutely no creative input at all. They were very polite and it was interesting to hear them talking – as we did our daily penance.”  (more…)

Tuesday morning of the VIP Preview; All photos on site for Art Observed by Caroline Claisse

Art Basel’s 43^rd edition commenced today with the first of two VIP Preview days.  The VIP Vernissage, however, drew a private audience yesterday evening, where the Art Unlimited and Art Standard programs were unveiled, revealing a collection of artwork impressive in both size and scope.  Today was also the preview and opening receptions for Basel’s companion fairs, like LISTE 17 and Design Miami/Basel.  Fair and section specific photosets for collective Basel happenings will be posted throughout the upcoming days.

Art Basel directors Annette Schönholzer and Marc Spiegler at the press conference

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Gilbert and George, Guns (2011). All images via White Cube.

The collaborative duo Gilbert and George opened London Pictures to large crowds in Hong Kong last week, bringing the duo’s brash, oddball brand of British pop to the east for the inauguration of the London-based White Cube gallery’s new location. Based on 3719 source images drawn from newsstand posters stolen in East London over the last six years, the 292 works which comprise the London Pictures are the largest single body of work yet created by the duo, and the exhibition spans all four White Cube spaces—the new Hong Kong location, as well as Bermondsey, Hoxton Square, and Mason’s Yard. The gridded patterns of anywhere from four to forty tiles of found text and imagery—with the artists added in—explore themes of violence, sex, and death, through various methods of repetition. According to the press release, the survey draws “directly on the quotidian life of a vast city, [and] allow[s] contemporary society to recount itself in its own language.”

Installation view (more…)

La Couleur en Avant at MAMAC, Nice. Martial Raysse, Nissa Bella (1964)  All pictures by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed.

The Museum of  Modern and Contemporary Art—MAMAC—in Nice, France is showing Arret sur image (which translates to ‘stop on image’) through October 23rd, and La Couleur en Avant (‘the color before’) through November 27th. Both exhibitions represent modern and contemporary artists, with an emphasis on the colors and fluidity within the contemporary. In Le Couleur en Avant, sculptures by Yves Klein and paintings by Henri Matisse, among others, are juxtaposed to show their influence on the pop art of Martial Raysse. Arret sur image, held in Ponchettes Gallery, displays work by living artists such as Gilbert and George, Robert Longo, and Barbara Kruger, expanding on the thematic influence of color in a contemporary context. The work in Ponchettes Gallery remains in MAMAC’s permanent collection.

Arret sur image by MAMAC at Galerie des Ponchettes, Nice.

More images after the jump… (more…)

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Gilbert and George, Buses (2009). Via The Independent

“They made themselves,” Gilbert and George reassure of the 564 postcard works that comprise the Urethra Series, only 155 of which are currently on view at White Cube, Mason’s Yard in London. Since their first exhibition of postcard works in 1972, Gilbert and George have continued methodically collecting postcards, phone box cards, fliers and other ephemeral, everyday modes of communication—two collections of which make up the Urethra Series. The Urethra Postcard Pictures represent 30 odd years of English visual culture, with images of Parliament and St. Paul’s Cathedral shown alongside S+M adverts and other such handouts that litter London’s phone boxes.

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Gilbert & George, with installation behind. Via SlamXHype

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