Gilbert & George at Sonnabend and Lehmann Maupin - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Against the stiff competition provided through the likes of Damien Hirst and the Chapman brothers, Gilbert & George are intent upon reclaiming their positions as the biggest bad striplings of contemporary British art. This massive two-gallery exhibition was compos of herculean photo-based paintings whose titles are liberally sprinkled with scatalogical bounds more commonly found on the walls of lavatories. Inscribed in large capital alphabetic characters on the canvases, these words present keys to the otherwise largely abstract photographic imagery which unfolds monumentally behind.

Spread above two galleries, the litany of nasty words -- greatest in quantity popular among them are "spunk" "piss," "shit" as well as the more simply descriptive "blood" "spit" and "tears" -- becomes mind-numbing after a while. The imagery, do not include for the recurring representations of enormous cigar-shaped turd is les overtly offensive. In fact (and this is clearly part of the point), a certain number of of the abstract patterns that be the effect from the enlargement of microscopic images of seed urine, blood and spittle are quite beautiful. The cellular constitution of blood, for instance, makes for intricately interlocked mosaics in r and black or r and white. Piss, pay backed in black and white against a bright fulvous ground, presents kaleidoscopic patterns that bring to mind white-frost spreading in tiny fingers across a window-pane. touchwood resembles a volcanic landscape.

For more [i]or[/i] less time there have been religious concerns in the duo's work. Previously, these have center upon beautiful, working-class boys enshrined as phenomenons of desire in cathedral-like spaces. Here, in the boys' stead, we have the artists themselves. often naked, they float before backdrops compos of cosmic arrangements of the fluid motifs. Generally the postures reinforce the artists' dead-pan inversion of respectability. Gilbert & George take revolves mooning viewers or standing stiffly at attention in their birthday suits. However in several works, the pair explicitly assume the personas of Adam and edge as in one work where the re-create the attitude s in Mantegna's Expulsion from Paradise.

The combination of like overt religious references with concerns to body fluids, the latter admittedly an important motif in Christian theology, moves that the artists have more fathomless aspirations than their cheeky titles put in mind of However, any genuine sublimity is undercut by means of the adolescent nature of their scatological fixations. While the works' crisp graphic diction and simplified colors are frequently said to invoke stained glass windows, a protracted stay in either gallery produc not in like manner much reverential awe as a desire to escape the relentles confrontation with elementary material substance processes.

As a originate the artists' intentions remain ambiguous. Their preoccupation with material part effluents may refer to the great Christian mysteries and the miraculous transfiguration of base matter into spirit. However, individual is left with a stronger impression of schoolboy whispering dirty cranks in the last row of the house of god during Sunday services.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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