.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
"We don't think we're two artists. We think we are an artist." (George, quoted in G. Prousch, Gilbert & George: The Rudimentary Pictures, exh. cat., Milton Keynes Gallery, 1999, p. 5).
Occupying a space between photography and the kind of ‘living sculpture’ for which they are known, Gilbert & George’s Imprisoned is a beguiling admixture of autobiography and abstraction, reality and illusion. A collection of trademark black-and-white prints strikingly arranged in three columns, the images generate a gripping, immersive uneasiness, as forms and patterns seem to replicate and intersect themselves, both in the double exposures of the photographs as well as in their composition. Together, they combine to give the impression of the interior of a room: it is almost portrayed coherently, only for the gaps between the photographs to interrupt the eye as it attempts to take in the planes of its walls, windows and floors. With the linoleum floor panels placed at its top and upward views of sky and window at its bottom, the work also takes on a topsy-turvy quality, as if the camera is falling, or, indeed, has already fallen over. Instead of straightforward spatial representation, the photographs possess a more nebulous formal logic, with the grids of the window panes recalled in the square patterning of the linoleum floor panelling. The effect is a woozy, floating motion, somewhat disorientating and yet at once extremely beautiful: the ghostly figures of Gilbert & George themselves take on an ethereal resonance, while the windows, lit up by blinding white light, seem to offer spectral visions into another world.
Executed in 1973 and first exhibited in their New Decorative Works show at the Galleria Sperone in Turin that same year, the work dates from the artist’s period of Drinking Sculptures, their first, critically acclaimed series of composite photographs that documented the drinking sessions of the time. Coming off the back of their ground-breaking 1970 performance piece The Singing Sculpture, in which they continuously performed the vaudeville tune ‘Underneath the Arches’ for as long as an entire day, the Drinking Sculptures were a means for the artists to suffuse their work with the material of the everyday, dissolving the boundary between art and reality even further. Alcohol seemed to represent a particularly good, and underrepresented, example of the quotidian, especially for artists: “[A]rtists would get smashed up at night, but in the morning they would go to their studio and make a perfect minimal sculpture” they have said, “They were alcoholic but their art was dead sober. We did the Drinking Sculptures as a reflection of life” (Gilbert & George, Gilbert & George: intimate conversations with Francois Jonquet, London 2004, p. 88).
Yet while it retains the woozily alcoholic, blurred atmosphere of their work from this time, unlike many of the pieces it was exhibited alongside–Muscadet, A Spilt Drink, Raining Gin, to name but three–the work’s title is less explicit in its relationship to drink. Rather than offering a mere depiction of the artist’s life, the work takes on a more lyrical, almost conceptual quality–as Gilbert & George themselves have said, “We never saw [our work] in terms of self-portraiture really. Not at all. Anyway, for years and years the images we took were of each other, so it wouldn’t be a self-portrait anyway” (Gilbert & George, in D. Sylvester, ‘I Tell You Where There Is Irony In Our Work: Nowhere, Nowhere, Nowhere’, Modern Painters, 10:4, Winter 1997). And indeed, in Imprisoned, instead of self-portraiture, the work seems to reflect an intangible, interpersonal emotional state shared between the two figures, as well as between the artist and viewer–the loss of control, the absence of freedom, an inability to escape.
Taken in the context of the Drinking Sculptures, this can be read as a comment on the destructive edge of the bohemian drinking culture in which the pair were established, but the work also possesses a more generalized emotional quality, with particularly strong resonances of later works. For one, the work’s use of square forms–the cross-hatching of the windows and the chequerboarding of the floor paneling–seems to anticipate the development of their now customary format, the regular photographic grid, with the Human Bondage series of 1974. Yet in the claustrophobic interest in the interior of a wall there are also hints of later series like Dusty Corners and Dead Boards, works which explored isolation and melancholy through the imagery of empty, old-fashioned rooms, as well as, of course, the figures of Gilbert & George themselves. Here, the windows seem to serve as both portals opening out onto bright new possibilities and barriers preventing their access; the double exposures themselves seem in themselves techniques of imprisonment, applying makeshift prison bars over the spaces of the rooms. “None of our works are documentaries. They are thoughts, spiritual,” (Gilbert & George, Gilbert & George: the Completed Pictures 1971-1985, London, 1986, p. xxi) they have said, describing their work, and in Imprisoned, this is clearer than ever–a psychologically rich, eerie impression of self-portraiture.
Occupying a space between photography and the kind of ‘living sculpture’ for which they are known, Gilbert & George’s Imprisoned is a beguiling admixture of autobiography and abstraction, reality and illusion. A collection of trademark black-and-white prints strikingly arranged in three columns, the images generate a gripping, immersive uneasiness, as forms and patterns seem to replicate and intersect themselves, both in the double exposures of the photographs as well as in their composition. Together, they combine to give the impression of the interior of a room: it is almost portrayed coherently, only for the gaps between the photographs to interrupt the eye as it attempts to take in the planes of its walls, windows and floors. With the linoleum floor panels placed at its top and upward views of sky and window at its bottom, the work also takes on a topsy-turvy quality, as if the camera is falling, or, indeed, has already fallen over. Instead of straightforward spatial representation, the photographs possess a more nebulous formal logic, with the grids of the window panes recalled in the square patterning of the linoleum floor panelling. The effect is a woozy, floating motion, somewhat disorientating and yet at once extremely beautiful: the ghostly figures of Gilbert & George themselves take on an ethereal resonance, while the windows, lit up by blinding white light, seem to offer spectral visions into another world.
Executed in 1973 and first exhibited in their New Decorative Works show at the Galleria Sperone in Turin that same year, the work dates from the artist’s period of Drinking Sculptures, their first, critically acclaimed series of composite photographs that documented the drinking sessions of the time. Coming off the back of their ground-breaking 1970 performance piece The Singing Sculpture, in which they continuously performed the vaudeville tune ‘Underneath the Arches’ for as long as an entire day, the Drinking Sculptures were a means for the artists to suffuse their work with the material of the everyday, dissolving the boundary between art and reality even further. Alcohol seemed to represent a particularly good, and underrepresented, example of the quotidian, especially for artists: “[A]rtists would get smashed up at night, but in the morning they would go to their studio and make a perfect minimal sculpture” they have said, “They were alcoholic but their art was dead sober. We did the Drinking Sculptures as a reflection of life” (Gilbert & George, Gilbert & George: intimate conversations with Francois Jonquet, London 2004, p. 88).
Yet while it retains the woozily alcoholic, blurred atmosphere of their work from this time, unlike many of the pieces it was exhibited alongside–Muscadet, A Spilt Drink, Raining Gin, to name but three–the work’s title is less explicit in its relationship to drink. Rather than offering a mere depiction of the artist’s life, the work takes on a more lyrical, almost conceptual quality–as Gilbert & George themselves have said, “We never saw [our work] in terms of self-portraiture really. Not at all. Anyway, for years and years the images we took were of each other, so it wouldn’t be a self-portrait anyway” (Gilbert & George, in D. Sylvester, ‘I Tell You Where There Is Irony In Our Work: Nowhere, Nowhere, Nowhere’, Modern Painters, 10:4, Winter 1997). And indeed, in Imprisoned, instead of self-portraiture, the work seems to reflect an intangible, interpersonal emotional state shared between the two figures, as well as between the artist and viewer–the loss of control, the absence of freedom, an inability to escape.
Taken in the context of the Drinking Sculptures, this can be read as a comment on the destructive edge of the bohemian drinking culture in which the pair were established, but the work also possesses a more generalized emotional quality, with particularly strong resonances of later works. For one, the work’s use of square forms–the cross-hatching of the windows and the chequerboarding of the floor paneling–seems to anticipate the development of their now customary format, the regular photographic grid, with the Human Bondage series of 1974. Yet in the claustrophobic interest in the interior of a wall there are also hints of later series like Dusty Corners and Dead Boards, works which explored isolation and melancholy through the imagery of empty, old-fashioned rooms, as well as, of course, the figures of Gilbert & George themselves. Here, the windows seem to serve as both portals opening out onto bright new possibilities and barriers preventing their access; the double exposures themselves seem in themselves techniques of imprisonment, applying makeshift prison bars over the spaces of the rooms. “None of our works are documentaries. They are thoughts, spiritual,” (Gilbert & George, Gilbert & George: the Completed Pictures 1971-1985, London, 1986, p. xxi) they have said, describing their work, and in Imprisoned, this is clearer than ever–a psychologically rich, eerie impression of self-portraiture.