- Les Deux Marins
Sheet: 27 3/16 × 34 1/4 in. (69 × 87 cm)
Frame: 31 5/8 × 40 5/8 × 2 5/16 in. (80.3 × 103.2 × 5.9 cm)
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Partners in love and art since the 1970s, Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard—working as Pierre et Gilles—have created an ever-expanding gay wonderland inhabited by a motley cast of idealized and adorned characters. With iconography inspired by divergent sources, including religion and mythology, pornography, advertising, and fashion photography, the duo carefully conceives and constructs each elaborate scene, which Pierre photographs and Gilles hand paints. In this campy self-portrait, the artists portray sailors, mainstay figures of the gay erotic imagination, dressed in uniforms and grasping the spokes of a ship’s wheel amid dazzling applied glitter.
ProvenanceThe Manfred Heiting Collection; given to MFAH, 2002.
Exhibition History"Pierre & Gilles," Musée d'Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium, February 16–May14, 2017; Musée d'art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre, France, May 27–August 20, 2017.
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