F*ck You And F*ck Those F*cking F*ckers: It's All Beards And Swearing In Bermondsey
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Last Updated 03 January 2018
It was the best of fucks, they put the fuck in art and it's all fuckitty doo dah. If there's an award for the most expletive riddled exhibition then we have a winner in the Gilbert & George exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey, an artist duo who consider themselves living sculptures.
All the walls of a lengthy corridor and one entire room are covered with creative ways of using the f-bomb. We're long past the time where you could offend people by using the word fuck, in fact we hear it pretty much every day on public transport.
Gilbert and George refer to this as their Fuckosophy, but it's lacking any philosophical depth. Yes the world may be fucked but saying that isn't anything new. It's a puerile gag taken too far, like a joke where you smile the first time you hear it but by the fourth time you hear it's starting to grate — well in this show it's repeated thousands of times and by the time we left we'd had more than enough.
The other half of this show relates to their beard pictures, giant works painted in lurid colours that make punters' eyes hurt if they look at it too long. In all images Gilbert & George appear with different beards — short ones, long intertwined ones and even festive Christmas beards. It references their home area of East London where both hipsters and Muslim men have beards but it doesn't offer us much more than this simple symbolism.
This vast exhibition has some visual appeal and appears fun on the surface. But dig a little deeper and we're left wanting.
So as far as we're concerned, Gilbert and George can fuck right off.
Gilbert & George: The beard pictures and their Fuckosophy is on at White Cube, Bermondsey, 144-152 Bermondsey Street, SE1 3TQ until . The exhibition is open Tuesday-Sunday.
