Gilbert & George - The Beard Pictures

'The Beard Pictures' are violent, eerie, grotesque, lurid and crazed. They show a dream-like world of paranoia and destruction and madness. Their strange sickly colours and creeping, smashed up, absurd landscapes confront the viewer with relentless aggression. 'The Beard Pictures depict' a world bereft of reason, in which negotiation no longer exists. Gilbert & George take their place within 'The Beard Pictures' as intense, red, staring, empty-headed, and sinister versions of themselves. Their eyes are shadowed and bizarrely prettified. Mutant, impish explorers or dead-headed sentinels, they seem to look at, into and through the viewer. They look as though their spirits might have left their bodies.