Gilbert & George at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris

Paris’ Louis Vuitton Foundation presents six monumental drawings by Gilbert & George. Take your chance to see the immersive work of these two artists in the basement galleries from 3 July to 26 August 2019.

After the Courtauld Collection, the ground floor spaces of the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris are to display a set of six monumental charcoal drawings on paper by Gilbert and Georges in 1971.

An immersive work on display for a short time

Exhibited for the first time in Paris, the immersive work There Were Two Young Men has a limited presentation for reasons of fragility. The video sculptures Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk (1972), In the Bush (1972) and A Portrait of the Artists as Young Men (1970) accompany this presentation.

The installation at the Louis Vuitton Foundation stages the triptych Class War, Militant, Gateway (1986), the first monumental work of the two artists. The frieze dominated by red, white and blue illustrates the adventure of the individual, from belonging to a community to the realisation of personal conscience and assertiveness.

Born in 1943 and 1942 respectively in San Martino de Badia (Italy) and Plymouth (England), both artists live and work in London. Shortly after leaving London’s St. Martin’s School of Art, where they met in 1967, Gilbert & George made a name for themselves by proclaiming themselves “living sculptures”.

Photographs assembled

Always dressed traditionally, they devote themselves in their work to a staging of the banal through the actions of walking, singing, reading or drinking. From these common activities, they have derived a visual material exploited since the early 1970s in assemblies of photographs – first in black and white, then in colour – whose grid format has been frequently compared to stained glass.

Gilbert & George claim an art for all. Religion, sexuality, death and violence are the main themes for compositions, directly inspired by their lives in a popular district of East London where they have settled from the start.

The Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris