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Lot Essay
Executed in 1983, Fall is one of the works that Gilbert and George exhibited under the umbrella title The Believing World. By this time, the artists had abandoned the black and white (and occasionally red) of their earlier works and had developed the means to create works in vivid, lurid colour. This was a concept that suited them all the more because they perceived the world of artists and critics at the time to be overly obsessed with avoiding dated concepts of beauty and, in pictorial terms, of eschewing colour to a great degree. In Fall, there is a rich interplay between the bold, Pop-like colours: the deep blue of the cross, the red of the background, the gold of the falling leaves. Although in many cases the artists had denied the likeness of their colour works to stained glass, in the pictures from The Believing World, which tackled religious themes, they had turned that observed similarity to their advantage.
The artists themselves are shown kneeling, tiny, at the cross, reminiscent of the donors in medieval religious paintings. They appear to be giving thanks, possibly for the autumn. At the same time, the title Fall is-- especially in the hands of a British pair of artists-- a deliberate pun. The colours are both autumnal and those of hellfire and damnation, invoking a completely different sense of 'fall.' It is precisely a religious ambivalence or ambiguity which the artists perceive both in themselves and, as part of a wider-arching societal structure, in the world at large that is being explored, the mixture of belief and scepticism, salvation and damnation, tradition and the modern. Gilbert & George appear to respect belief, while retaining their own shreds of it too, and it is their own personal attitude to religion as well as the attitudes of the wider public that they are investigating here, as can be seen from their own interview comments:
Gilbert: When a tribal person makes a sculpture, he doesn't think he's doing art. He wants to make a sculpture for a god. That's what we like. And we are very near that. That's why some say we don't make art.
George: We don't like the idea that to be an intellectual is to be an atheist, that every 20th-century artist, every 20th-century writer has, by definition, to be a non-church-goer. We don't want to divide society into naïve people who believe in god and sophisticated people who don't.
Gilbert: We think every single person is religious, to a certain degree. That's what we are, as well. We try to sort out what that means. Sometimes people are shocked by pictures of shit and so on, but we don't want to make them run from the gallery. We don't like that. We want to push forward in our art, so we must keep the viewer there. That's very important.
(Gilbert & George, quoted in Gilbert & George: The Complete Pictures 1971-1985, Stuttgart 1986, p. xxxi).
The artists themselves are shown kneeling, tiny, at the cross, reminiscent of the donors in medieval religious paintings. They appear to be giving thanks, possibly for the autumn. At the same time, the title Fall is-- especially in the hands of a British pair of artists-- a deliberate pun. The colours are both autumnal and those of hellfire and damnation, invoking a completely different sense of 'fall.' It is precisely a religious ambivalence or ambiguity which the artists perceive both in themselves and, as part of a wider-arching societal structure, in the world at large that is being explored, the mixture of belief and scepticism, salvation and damnation, tradition and the modern. Gilbert & George appear to respect belief, while retaining their own shreds of it too, and it is their own personal attitude to religion as well as the attitudes of the wider public that they are investigating here, as can be seen from their own interview comments:
Gilbert: When a tribal person makes a sculpture, he doesn't think he's doing art. He wants to make a sculpture for a god. That's what we like. And we are very near that. That's why some say we don't make art.
George: We don't like the idea that to be an intellectual is to be an atheist, that every 20th-century artist, every 20th-century writer has, by definition, to be a non-church-goer. We don't want to divide society into naïve people who believe in god and sophisticated people who don't.
Gilbert: We think every single person is religious, to a certain degree. That's what we are, as well. We try to sort out what that means. Sometimes people are shocked by pictures of shit and so on, but we don't want to make them run from the gallery. We don't like that. We want to push forward in our art, so we must keep the viewer there. That's very important.
(Gilbert & George, quoted in Gilbert & George: The Complete Pictures 1971-1985, Stuttgart 1986, p. xxxi).