Baronian Xippas is pleased to be hosting the first solo exhibition of Gilbert & George in Knokke.
These ‘THIRTEEN EARTHLY PICTURES’ are as vivid and disquieting as a lucid dream. The episodes and events they depict appear both agitated and frozen in time. Epiphany and confrontation combine in their mood, buffeting and stunning Gilbert & George like sudden cyclones. The weather of these earthly scenes feels simultaneously humid and chill.
Intense sensibilities pervade the ‘THIRTEEN EARTHLY PICTURES’ and combine within them, setting the antic pace of their mysterious and unsettling chapter. The pictures derive from that which is ‘earthly’ (relating to the Earth and the human race) yet pictorially the worlds of their temper appear both external and internal: a journey to the centre of the Earth, perhaps, that might also be a journey within the raw organic matter of the Earth.
(text by Michael Bracewell)