43 - Gilbert & George (British, 1943 and 1942)

Gilbert & George (British, 1943 and 1942) Mental N° 9 - 1976 Nine hand-tinted silver gelatin photographs 187 x 157 cm Signed, titled, and dated on the central photograph Provenance: Galerie Vega, Liège The Robert and Suzanne Pannier Collection, Bruges Published: Carter Ratcliff, Gilbert and George. Complete Pictures 1971-1985, Rizzoli, New York, 1986, p.100 Wolf Jahn, The Art of Gilbert & George or an Aesthetic of Existence, Thames and Hudson, London, 1989, p.214 (ill.) Exhibited: Robert Self Gallery, London, Gilbert & George. Mental, 1976 Eindhoven, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Gilbert and George: Photo-Pieces 1968-1980, 1980-1981 (illustrated in colour, p. 262). This exhibition later travelled to Dusseldorf, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf； Bern, Kunsthalle Bern； Paris, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou and London, Whitechapel Gallery. The Mental series was first exhibited in 1976 at the Robert Self Gallery, London. Continuing the pictorial language first established in the Cherry Blossom series of 1974, the works combine hand-tinted silver gelatin photographs mounted flush within narrow frames to form a rigorous orthogonal grid. Individual photographs are thus transformed into unified pictorial constructions in which colour, repetition and seriality become compositional principles in their own right. Mental No. 9 is composed of nine photographs arranged around a central panel bearing both the title and the artists' signatures. Four monochrome portraits depict Gilbert and George standing expressionless against a plain white background, while the four corner panels, hand-coloured in vivid red and black, present deserted London streets at night. At the centre, a flowering cherry tree introduces the only overtly natural motif within the composition. The strict geometry of the grid establishes a visual order that binds these disparate images together. The appearance of the cherry blossom is telling. It inevitably recalls the Cherry Blossom series realised two years earlier, despite the curious fact that no flowering trees appear anywhere in that earlier body of work. Here the blossom finally materialises, bringing with it associations of renewal and the fleeting nature of life. Yet, surrounded by deserted streets and the artists' impassive self-portraits, its delicate beauty offers little reassurance. Instead, it acquires an unsettling ambiguity, poised between hope and foreboding, serenity and latent violence. The juxtaposition of these seemingly unrelated subjects charges the composition with an indefinable tension. Here, the flowering branches, the blood-red streets and the artists' impassive presence become inseparable elements of a single mental landscape.