MANTUA.- Nearly two decades after their last major solo exhibition in Italy, Gilbert & George are back in the country with a focused presentation at the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, bringing together eight landmark works that span almost sixty years of the London-based duo’s career.

Now on view at Palazzo della Ragione through April 5, 2027, the exhibition traces the artists’ enduring investigation of sex, politics, religion, urban identity and mortality, while also highlighting their long relationship with legendary dealer and collector Ileana Sonnabend. The eight works are being presented in Italy for the first time.

The connection between Gilbert & George and the Sonnabend Gallery dates to 1971, when their celebrated performance The Singing Sculpture inaugurated Sonnabend’s New York space. From the beginning, the artists made their own lives, appearances and bodies inseparable from their work, developing a practice in which the role of the artist became a form of continuous performance.

That history is central to the Mantua exhibition. Mario Codognato, artistic director of the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, describes Gilbert & George as among the artists with whom Ileana Sonnabend and Antonio Homem maintained one of the longest and closest personal and professional relationships in contemporary art. The exhibition brings together early and recent works in order to show how the pair’s distinctive visual language has evolved while retaining its direct, confrontational character.

At the historical end of the presentation is THE BAR II from 1972, a monumental composition made up of nine charcoal-on-paper panels. Created at a moment when abstraction still dominated much of the contemporary art scene, the work was conceived as what the artists called a “gigantic letter” to the world, returning everyday gestures and familiar social spaces to the center of artistic inquiry.





Instead of the expected movement and noise of a pub, THE BAR II is dominated by emptiness and a restrained melancholy. Gilbert & George appear life-size within the composition, standing in quiet contemplation and turning an ordinary urban environment into something closer to an existential stage.

The exhibition then moves into the artists’ increasingly complex engagement with contemporary social and political life.

In FREE-FALL, from the 2005 SONOFAGOD PICTURES, a grid-based composition evokes the fractured visual experience of the modern city and globalization. Gilbert & George position themselves as witnesses within the image, confronting questions of spirituality and secular existence.

That tension becomes more aggressive in BALE, from the 2013 SCAPEGOATING PICTURES. Here the artists appear masked like medieval warriors amid nitrous oxide canisters collected from the streets. Arranged to resemble explosive devices, the objects contribute to an atmosphere shaped by industrial violence, war and terrorism, while the work addresses tolerance, secularism, fundamentalism and discrimination.

Street culture becomes even more explicit in PISS OFF!, from the 2014 UTOPIAN PICTURES. Borrowing from graffiti, surveillance signs and the visual vocabulary of public warnings, the work combines forceful slogans with messages opposing fascism and nationalism and supporting homosexual revolt. The result reflects the continuing conflict between authority and protest in metropolitan life.

In BEARDWAY, from THE BEARD PICTURES of 2016, Gilbert & George merge their faces with textures resembling rusted wire mesh. The exaggerated, almost weapon-like beards become masks, turning the artists once again into strange and deliberately unsettling observers of their surroundings.

Later works broaden the exhibition’s emotional and symbolic range.

THRICE, from THE PARADISICAL PICTURES of 2019, places the artists within a lush, psychedelic environment that suggests a secular paradise without original sin. Nature becomes the setting for a broader reflection on the unpredictable journey of humanity.

The following year, FREE HK, from the NEW NORMAL PICTURES, brought Gilbert & George back to the streets of their Spitalfields neighborhood in London. Chinese characters, the British flag, emojis, marijuana packaging and other fragments of contemporary visual culture collide in an image connecting Britain’s colonial history with the realities of a globalized present.

The presentation concludes with X, from the 2022 CORPSING PICTURES. Its title plays on the theatrical expression “corpsing,” used in Britain for the moment when an actor breaks character by laughing, while simultaneously invoking the literal idea of the corpse. Life, death and performance become intertwined in a work that functions as both a contemporary memento mori and a reflection on the artists’ lifelong insistence that art and existence cannot be separated.

The Gilbert & George focus arrives as the Sonnabend Collection Mantova also refreshes its permanent display, reinforcing its stated goal of functioning as an evolving collection rather than a static museum presentation.

Among the additions are three works on paper made by Roy Lichtenstein in 1961 — Airplane, Man with Coat and Knock Knock — offering an early view of the graphic vocabulary that would soon become synonymous with the artist.

The new installation also includes four canvases from Andy Warhol’s Flowers series of 1964 and two important works by Jeff Koons from the 1980s: Jim Beam - Barrel Car from 1986 and Buster Keaton from 1988. The latter revisits the American silent-film star through carved wood, while the polished steel surface of Jim Beam - Barrel Car transforms an object of industrial manufacture into something approaching a pristine, almost ceremonial presence.

The changing display reflects the broader history of the Sonnabend Collection and the cross-Atlantic relationships that shaped it. Ileana Sonnabend played a crucial role in connecting American and European contemporary art, and the Mantua institution continues that dialogue in the medieval setting of Palazzo della Ragione.

The museum opened only ten months before the announcement of the Gilbert & George exhibition, and city and foundation officials see the new presentation as part of a wider effort to establish Mantua as a destination for internationally significant contemporary art. The institution is the result of a partnership between the Municipality of Mantua, the Sonnabend Collection Foundation and Marsilio Arte, with support from BPER Banca.

Gilbert & George is on view at the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, Palazzo della Ragione, Piazza Erbe 18, Mantua, through April 5, 2027.