Curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Hans Ulrich Obrist

Subtitled with characteristic modesty—and a nod to the epochal London Expo of 1851—this full-bore touring retrospective samples some five decades of Gilbert & George’s work. Embracing everything from the duo’s earliest forays into their now long-established gridded-and-tinted photo format, such as 1977’s Bent Shit Cunt, to their recent “THE BEARD PICTURES” series, 2015–16, curators Birnbaum and Obrist survey the living sculptures’ factory-like output in the run-up to the 2020 opening of their private museum in London. While reliably dapper, the seventy-somethings rarely shy away from questionable taste in either imagery or opinion (their recent, apparently sincere anointing of Donald Trump as a “genius” was a particularly bitter pill to swallow), and their frequently lurid, quasi-heraldic explorations of sex, death, race, and religion are still capable of needling the unprepared. Travels to Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, September 12, 2019–January 2020; Reykjavik Art Museum, May 30–September 20, 2020.

— Michael Wilson