GalleryViewer states that G4 is short for artists' collective "Gang of Four" consisting of Aldert Mantje, Peter Kempff, Toon den Heijer and Menno Schenk. Mantje explains the name of the collective as follows:
"We are the" Gang of Four ", named after a popular British, politically engaged band from the seventies. But really we're just a bunch of old men messing around.
(Vice, 10022017).
A few years ago, the lot met for the first time and decided to start a collective. Each artist adds his own work to the body of work time after time without the individual touch disappearing. The symbolic, figurative painting style of Aldert Mantje in particular gives the works a somewhat alienating character, as do the portrait drawings of the artists. The paintings of G4 are also called "Journalistic Paintings" since they often take a newspaper photo as a starting point and then - partly - paint it. With this they indicate that each painting arises from reinterpreted current events. G4 have now drawn over 600 portraits of artists, a kind of family tree of the art world from 1970 to the present, ranging from Marc Bijl to Francis Bacon and from Tinkebell to Ai Wei Wei. The project is named after 'The Famous Artists School', an American institute where you could learn to draw in 24 lessons. The right motivation for these anarchists not to be involved with art. Yet, says Peter van de Kemp, “the sheer number of drawings make it an interesting concept again despite their apparent silliness". And I cannot argue with that. I would like to give my father a portrait of Joseph Beuys, or no, rather a portrait of someone like Tinkebell, because he must keep up with the times.