Inspired — or traumatized, as they call it — by their own recent retrospective, which traveled to six museums in Europe and the US, the two set to work on a new series of pictures, their largest ever, and are now debuting selections of the 153 unique works from the Jack Freak Pictures in Berlin and Paris.
On view at Berlin’s Arndt & Partner through September 18 and Paris’ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac through July 25, the Jack Freak Pictures portray the artists as dancing vaudevillians, robotic avatars, and mutating monsters — all set against a background patterned by the British flag, a map, old medals, and bits of nature and urban life. In a conversation with London’s Serpentine Gallery co-director of exhibitions and programs Hans Ulrich Obrist in Berlin, the artists revealed that, after their retrospective, they felt compelled to start all over again. The first picture they made had the Union Jack in it, and they decided to carry that symbol of national identity and subcultural revolt through the rest of the series, pulling every nuance out of it.
– Paul Laster via (artkrush)
