This Thursday 10th September, iconic multi-medium artists Pierre et Gilles are presenting at Galerie Templon’s Rue Beaubourg space with a set of works created over the past two years.
The featured image above is called Le vendeur de tours Eiffel starring Ibrahima Ramon Magassa and below you can see previews of four other works:
La Reinettes Océans starring Adèle Farine
Le Petit Bizut with Vincent Cohen
Bonjour Pierre et Gilles (self-portrait), and
La Pêche Miraculeuse avec Pierre et Filip
Pierre et Gilles are famed for their iconic portraits which fuse painting and photography. They have been creating for over 40 years, aesthetically, this series is in line with their existing works but also being dubbed “their most introspective and critical work to date” due to it’s more diverse subjects and thought matter. For the exhibition, they use their astute observations of society to concoct bittersweet pieces that reflect the contradictions of our era.
The exhibition opens with the self-portrait created in the studio during the lockdown: Bonjour Pierre et Gilles, which pays tribute to Gustave Courbet’s painting Bonjour Monsieur Courbet. It shows the couple wandering on a bucolic path, lost among housing estates and residential suburbs. With a knowing look and their trademark benevolence, Pierre et Gilles invite us into their unique universe, an artificial world as wondrous as it is disturbing.
This constellation of exceedingly diverse portraits is shot through with a message that is both subtly engaged. Pierre et Gilles have chosen to end the exhibition with a collection of works centring on the sea and the underwater world that is increasingly under threat. Using litter gathered on the beaches of Le Havre, Gilles’s hometown, they have created fantastical scenes in subaquatic kingdoms. The astonishingly inventive and beautiful results seem to offer a troubled statement about the changes the world is undergoing.
The exhibition opens this Thursday 10th September at Galerie Templon Paris.
Toutes les images: ©Courtesy Templon, Paris–Brussels