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Lot Essay
Gilbert & George’s 2005 Lamp is an elegant example of the British duo’s Ginkgo Series, produced on the occasion of the artists representing Great Britain at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Showcasing their visual wit and flair for compositional balance, Lamp features several of pair’s iconic motifs while adhering to a controlled, sublime and noticeably naturalistic palette of yellows and black. Executed in sixteen equally sized panels, the picture features the artists, elongated and book-matched down the middle, wearing abstracted Ginkgo-printed suits. With each man occupying three panels, the remaining ten are occupied by nearly symmetrical leaves, each filling its own cell.
Above the artists’ heads is the painting’s title, rendered in a font meant to suggest or simulate traditional Hebrew script. Across the two lower corners is the date of the work, 2005, written in a compressed font that approximates Gothic manuscript lettering. Joining both sides of the picture and the artists at its center, the Ginkgo leaves’ elongated stems sag and connect across the image, creating a rib-cage effect that slightly disrupts the familiar grid pattern.
Gilbert & George, who were drawn to the Ginkgo tree for its hardiness and ability to flourish in urban environments, and, according to the artists, its olfactory resemblance to “dog shit”, began thinking about the series while in New York a 2004 gallery exhibition (Quoted by M. Gayford, ‘Gilbert and George in the Mirror,’ The Daily Telegraph, June 01, 2005, via https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3642994/Gilbert-and-George-in-the-mirror.html). While walking by Gramercy Park on the way back to their hotel, they spotted the leaves and, having never seen them before, brought them back to London. Only after undertaking significant work on the ambitious series did the artists realize the prevalence of the Ginkgo tree, which grows in mainland Europe, the Americas, parts of Asia and the United Kingdom.
According to Gilbert & George, despite the Ginkgo leaf’s natural near-symmetry, the artists “…distorted the leaves. We cut and mirrored them in many different ways. We didn't like them as they were” (Ibid.) Indeed, mirroring is perhaps the dominant visual strategy at play in the Ginkgo series, as in the Perversive series before it. Here, though, the compositions are almost always symmetrical, as are the individual elements within them. For Gilbert & George, the Ginkgo leaf, like the graffiti tags of previous series, is a seemingly decorative element that, through broad visual associations and repeated appearances in varying contexts, takes on an expanded and unifying role in the work.
Referring to themselves early on as “living sculptures”, Gilbert & George have long sought to collapse the space between life and art. While moving beyond performance decades before Lamp was created, the work retains elements of that life-as-art ethos with at-once personal and decidedly universal subject matter. A humble, foul-smelling leaf lifted from a New York sidewalk becomes the basis for the British Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale by way of Gilbert & George’s famously cryptic and densely layered practice. For the artists, human experience and a decidedly non-academic approach to art-making results in pictures like Lamp, whose meaning is fully wrapped up in the experience and process by which it came to exist.
Above the artists’ heads is the painting’s title, rendered in a font meant to suggest or simulate traditional Hebrew script. Across the two lower corners is the date of the work, 2005, written in a compressed font that approximates Gothic manuscript lettering. Joining both sides of the picture and the artists at its center, the Ginkgo leaves’ elongated stems sag and connect across the image, creating a rib-cage effect that slightly disrupts the familiar grid pattern.
Gilbert & George, who were drawn to the Ginkgo tree for its hardiness and ability to flourish in urban environments, and, according to the artists, its olfactory resemblance to “dog shit”, began thinking about the series while in New York a 2004 gallery exhibition (Quoted by M. Gayford, ‘Gilbert and George in the Mirror,’ The Daily Telegraph, June 01, 2005, via https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3642994/Gilbert-and-George-in-the-mirror.html). While walking by Gramercy Park on the way back to their hotel, they spotted the leaves and, having never seen them before, brought them back to London. Only after undertaking significant work on the ambitious series did the artists realize the prevalence of the Ginkgo tree, which grows in mainland Europe, the Americas, parts of Asia and the United Kingdom.
According to Gilbert & George, despite the Ginkgo leaf’s natural near-symmetry, the artists “…distorted the leaves. We cut and mirrored them in many different ways. We didn't like them as they were” (Ibid.) Indeed, mirroring is perhaps the dominant visual strategy at play in the Ginkgo series, as in the Perversive series before it. Here, though, the compositions are almost always symmetrical, as are the individual elements within them. For Gilbert & George, the Ginkgo leaf, like the graffiti tags of previous series, is a seemingly decorative element that, through broad visual associations and repeated appearances in varying contexts, takes on an expanded and unifying role in the work.
Referring to themselves early on as “living sculptures”, Gilbert & George have long sought to collapse the space between life and art. While moving beyond performance decades before Lamp was created, the work retains elements of that life-as-art ethos with at-once personal and decidedly universal subject matter. A humble, foul-smelling leaf lifted from a New York sidewalk becomes the basis for the British Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale by way of Gilbert & George’s famously cryptic and densely layered practice. For the artists, human experience and a decidedly non-academic approach to art-making results in pictures like Lamp, whose meaning is fully wrapped up in the experience and process by which it came to exist.