In the exhibition titled Palindrome, ARNDT brings together four artworks into conversation, two each by Gilbert and George and Jitish Kallat. Generationally far apart and geographically distant their art is often informed by the cities where they live; the quotidian and the unexceptional become the ground for playful and probing investigations.

As with a ‘Palindrome’, where a text may be read the same way in either forward or reverse direction, the four pictures in the exhibition unfold in symmetry. For instance in ‘LIFE STRAIGHT’ from the remarkable ‘London Pictures’, Gilbert and George classify 4000 newspaper clipping based on a repeated key word ‘life’, their often shocking and contradictory recurrence create dense narratives overlaid on disintegrating self-portraits of the artists; their vigilant eyes penetrating these complex chronicles. In Kallat’s paintings a person might read a newspaper while criss-crossing zippers, evoking topographical views of street-maps or railway tracks, unveil an overcast sky, elsewhere a daily commute becomes the site for the celestial and the uncanny to dishevel the habitual. In Kallat’s paintings layered with varied references, a photographic image often acts as a trigger to proliferate the picture plane with stories; In Gilbert and George the grandeur and grammar of history painting is re-invented through the format of photography. ‘Palindrome’ animates the many formal and thematic overlaps between two artists in whose work the picture plane becomes a resourceful ground to fashion a vision of the world.

-ARNDT

Image: © Jitish Kallat