Gilbert & George at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

Gilbert & George’s major exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in New Zealand brings the duo’s monumental early pictures into conversation with more recent bodies of work, which evoke the air of paranormal ritual embodied in the artist’s performances.

For five decades, to international acclaim, the duo has been making art that is visionary, shocking, relentless, moral and richly atmospheric. In the ‘LONDON PICTURES’ (2011) Gilbert & George presents an epic survey of modern urban life in all its volatility, tragedy and absurdity through pictures created from the sorting and classification by subject of nearly 4000 newspaper headline posters. In the ‘SCAPEGOATING PICTURES’ (2013–15), the duo appears shattered and spirit-like, at times dead-eyed and impassive, superimposed onto images that invoke the bigotry, paranoia and accusation of a fractured, fearful society. And in the ‘NEW NORMAL PICTURES’ (2021), images of apparent normality – featuring litter, railings, drug bags, shovels and trinkets – are skewed in a way that speaks to a ‘post-everything’ bleak otherworldliness.