Gilbert and George

Private Collection, New York
Zwirner and Wirth, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2004

Bordeaux, CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain; Basel, Kunsthalle; Brussels, Palais des Beaux Arts; Madrid, Palacio de Velázquez; Munich, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus; London, Hayward Gallery, Gilbert & George, The Complete Pictures 1971-1985, 1986-87, p. 251, illustrated in colour

Rudi Fuchs, Gilbert & George, The Complete Pictures 1971-2005, Vol. 1: 1971-1988, London 2007, p. 525, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant and the illustration fails to convey the metallic quality of the silver leaf. Condition: This work is in very good condition. As to be expected with the artists' choice of media, close inspection reveals a very small number of very minor and short hairline scratches to the corners of several metal frames, with one or two minute specks of associated oxidation in places; and a very small number of minute losses to the silver leaf, which appear inherent to the artists' working process. Examination under raking light reveals one or two very minor and short hairline rub-marks to the Perspex surfaces.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

"The 1980s ushered in a rich creative period for Gilbert & George.  Their inner demons seemed less ravenous, an ardent universe unfolded, full of bright colours, in increasingly huge formats." (Francois Jonquet, Gilbert & George: intimate conversations with Francois Jonquet, London 2004, p.105)

Gilbert & George's Swear is an outstanding example of the compositional and chromatic exuberance that characterised their work by the mid-1980s. Executed in 1985 and belonging to the series of New Moral Works first exhibited at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York in 1985, Swear truly emblematises the commanding aesthetic of monumental proportions iconic of their mature style.  A departure from the black, white and red works produced in the previous decade, the large-scale photo-sculptures from this period channel an elegiac allusion to devotional fervour announced in the explosion of strident colour and strong structural arrangement reminiscent of stained glass. In Swear Gilbert & George deliver a chromatically striking and confrontational formal clarity as a means to deliver an instructive code.  Relayed in the authoritative titling, the present work commandingly transmits the artists' central belief in art as a universal language of redemption and agency of human betterment; herein Swear compounds Gilbert & George's fundamental edict: "The true function of Art is to bring about new understanding, progress and advancement" (Gilbert & George, 'What Our Art Means', in: Exhibition Catalogue, Bordeaux, CAPC Musee d'Art Contmporain and travelling, Gilbert and George: The Complete Pictures 1971-1985, 1986-87, p. vii).

The artist's first photographic works were in part the documentary residue of their early performance based art, the Living Sculpture pieces begun in 1969, in one of which the artists, made-up, suited and standing on a pedestal, pantomimed to a tinny recording of the popular song 'Underneath the Arches'.  In the 1970s, with the onset of impermanent performance and process based art, the need for documentation was keenly felt in artistic circles.  This impulse for documentation became integral to the communication of Gilbert & George's artistic vision and their 'Art for All' conviction that art must strive towards social betterment.  Pioneering a new art form, their work ignored the usual divisions between sculpture, painting and photography while also rejecting the modernist habit of seeing a difference between art and life. As propounded by the artists: "We believe that art is there for the meaning, and that artists who make what we call art-art, just add to this funny, quirky, history of technique and isms, are very wrong.  They're missing the whole point of the function of art.  We believe that people should be different having had contact with our works. If they bring their life – as opposed to their knowledge of isms – it will be thrown into contrast by the works.  It's like if you travelled to India, your life is thrown into contrast by another reality, and that advances you in a way.  You accept or reject or combine. But you are never the same." (George cited in: Carter Radcliffe, 'Gilbert & George: The Fabric of their World', in: Ibid., p. xvii)

Reaching a heightened crescendo in the 1980s photo-pieces, the injection of an intensely fantastical and hallucinatory element indicates a detachment from a direct signification of the grime and misery of city life; whilst formally, the introduction of bleeding the compositional arrangement across multiple panels marks a progression towards an enhanced monumental pictorial synthesis distanced from the singular panelled composites of the 1970s. Masterfully evident in the present work, the lurid colouring, colossal scale and commanding statuesque figures converge to form an arresting confrontational schema of ceremonial magnitude.  Analogous to images embedded within luminously coloured glass panes, Gilbert & George's aesthetic shares a chromatic and geometrical sensibility found in the nineteenth-century stained glass windows of Edward Burne-Jones.  At once secular and saintly, Gilbert & George appear frontally posed, resolute and upright, like frightening larger than life-sized caryatids within the architecture of their composition.  Superimposed against a landscape of teenage street boys, these blue-clad figures introduce an intermediary between the earthbound reality and Gilbert & George's artistic psychological fiction.  As Carter Radcliffe has outlined: "Gilbert and George must depart from ordinary appearances to give their art its life-like quality – for life feels particularly convincing when we see past its ordinariness to the part our seeing plays in endowing things with their worth.  Put in that visionary mood by the devotional extravagance of Gilbert and George's art, a viewer's feelings could we be redirected toward 'progress and betterment'" (Ibid., p. xxxii).

A cosmic symmetry informs the imposing visual impact of Swear; not only in the harmonious balance and distribution of figures across the twenty-four part work, but also in the dual meaning of the title.  This kind of duality is constant throughout their production, inherent to the core of Gilbert & George as a single but dual artistic identity.  At once calling to mind expletives and obscenities – of which many can be found across Gilbert & George's oeuvre – the word 'swear' simultaneously alludes to an oath or a vow, a profession of faith for a structured belief system.  In the present work, the duality of Swear promulgates a particularly grand emotive statement that morally posits art as locus of the sacred and the profane.  Conflated with the instructive title, the artists' emblematic status free-floating in front of a liturgy of young males, dialectically posits a visual coda that fuses intention and image in a modern expression of faith in artifice, visually reinforcing the artists' transcendental exegesis: "We try to reach, to find a soul or a kind of God that is beyond our art.' (Gilbert cited in: Ibid., p. xx).