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Art review Duo's lust for urban life still in the rudest of health
The Guardian
|October 07, 2025
The first picture in Gilbert & George's retrospective of their art so far this century is a portrait of them sitting in a cemetery amid floating drug baggies, their suits bright purple and green against the gravestones.
It sums up a stillness, a sadness and a romantic passion that breathes in this show - but you won't notice it straight away.
Instead you'll be carried along in a rush of cheeky provocations and ludicrous juxtapositions of word and image: a joyous embrace of modern life or even, pardon my French, a jouissance.
The pictures tower and expand in this perfect brutalist setting, as if you're walking through a city of art a dirty, disreputable city.
Ages (2001) is a yellow and red slab almost the scale of a cinema screen on which the artists' faces are surrounded by adverts for male sex workers: "BLACK GUY 24 Marco. Sexy, horny and waiting", "27 YEARS OLD Latin, and very good looking", "SKINHEAD JOE, 26 East End/10 mins Liverpool St Administers firm service".
Where are they now? Is Skinhead Joe running a cafe or is he dead? You find yourself not sniggering but wondering about these young men. It's a slice of life, a montage of transactions; moments; relations of power, desire and money in a metropolis.
The artists are great, scabrous chroniclers of London in the tradition of Hogarth.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 07, 2025-Ausgabe von The Guardian.
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