Gilbert & George Swear Box 2023 14.2 x 9.9 x 8.6 cm | 5 1/2 x 4 x 3 1/2 in. Published by The Gilbert & George Centre, 2023
Gilbert & George’s idiosyncratic and irreverent wordplay is teasingly reimagined in Swear Box (2023), the eponymous object brandished with censored expletives. In their signature ironic fashion, the artists’ handmade birch plywood box extends the materiality of language to comical ends. Swear Box recalls the artists’ use of linguistic provocation in their historic 1977 series ‘DIRTY WORDS PICTURES’, where sampled words speak potently of the turbulent political, social, racial, religious and sexual mores of 1970s urban life.