I would not fight to the death with anyone who described Osgemeos’s work as twee and repetitive. And yet, honestly, I love it. “Endless Story” is an unusually exuberant museum show. Imaginatively installed across a full floor at the Hirshhorn, it feels joyous, funny and unstuffy.
Washington DC's Hirschorn Museum Has a Street Art Exhibit
Don't get me wrong. I love Osgemeos, having seen their work in many international cities. But I get a bit worried when major museums begin to showcase street art. I think that the allure of street art is its unabashed freedom that is not restricted by established museum walls. So now as per the Washington Post.....
Museum shows can be death for street art. Osgemeos look alive and well.
In a Hirshhorn show squirming with energy, the famous Brazilian twins toss out discernment for populist exuberance.
You could write a lengthy history of efforts by artists to bust out of the studios, galleries and wealthy homes that traditionally confine them. A lot of those efforts create friction. Graffiti art is part of this story. The identical twins Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, known to the world as Osgemeos (Portuguese for “the twins”), have been the face of Brazilian graffiti art for several decades now. Their gradual crossover into mainstream international art-world acceptance is sealed by a year-long exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum. Organized by Marina Isgro with the support of CJ Greenhill Caldera, “Osgemeos: Endless Story” is billed as the artists’ first U.S. museum survey and the largest U.S. exhibition of their work.
Born in 1974, the Pandolfo twins grew up in São Paulo. They weren’t yet 10 when they first encountered hip-hop culture. Under the influence of their older brother Arnaldo, they took to drawing and their parents soon enrolled them in a free art course. “Wild Style,” an influential film about hip-hop, was a big early influence, and by 1986 they had transformed themselves into young B-boys — a local DJ nicknamed them Os Gemeos — hanging out at the São Bento subway station in São Paulo, breakdancing, rapping and making graffiti.
By the 2000s, the Pandolfo twins were making major murals on city walls and subway cars, even as they were showing in commercial galleries. In 2004, in the lead-up to the Summer Olympic Games, they were invited to make two murals in the host city, Athens. The following year they made their first New York mural outside a Coney Island subway station, and they later made a mural in downtown Manhattan, on the same site (the intersection of Houston Street and the Bowery) as a famous mural by Keith Haring. They were establishing pedigree.
When Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art gave them a solo show in 2012, the exhibit was complemented by a large-scale mural commission — a boy in patterned pajamas crouching in a space that was perfectly congruent with the building’s silhouette. An eruption of color and pattern in gray downtown Boston, it totally transformed the cityscape.
The Hirshhorn presentation includes a montage of blown-up photographs of Osgemeos’s best-known murals, which have appeared all over the world.
Of course, institutional acceptance in the form of commissioned murals is one thing. But my sense is that, within the graffiti community, art world success, in the shape of museum surveys and commercial gallery representation, can be fatal to street credibility. So be it. If success is a deathbed, Osgemeos look surprisingly alive and comfortable in it.
Their show squirms with energy. Every gallery is different. Early on, a phalanx of display cabinets teems with sketches, comic strips and graffiti paraphernalia, all of it revealing the twins’ working methods and impressive drawing skills. As you go further in, you sense a creative partnership that thrives on expansion — into film, sculpture and installation art, and the creation of futuristic fantasy worlds.
