Pirelli HangarBicocca is a cultural institution led by Vicente Todolí dedicated to the promotion of contemporary art through exhibitions of international importance .
Starting in 2016, and continuing for the next two years, the large area outside Pirelli HangarBicocca’s Cubo building, which covers more than 1.000 sqm, will be made available for annual site-specific works, commissioned to international artists.
Os Gemeos worked on the first artwork intervention ” Efêmero ” ( ephemeral ) covering a total area of a thousand square meters, in the first “Outside the Cube” arts program at Pirelli’s HangarBicocca
The project by Os Gemeos will remain on the two outer walls of Pirelli HangarBicocca’s Cubo space for 1 year and is It is visible from the nearby train tracks and from the street.
Curated by Cedar Lewisohn, this project is dedicated to street art and related forms of art connected to the urban setting and public contexts, and the twins had the honor to open it with a large mural installation entitled Efêmero (ephemeral).
Efêmero, the multi-story high piece from the twins is their first major public work in Italy.
Drawing inspiration from the shape and history of the Pirelli HangarBicocca building, where train locomotives were built during the twentieth century, as well as from the close proximity of railway lines running parallel to the site, Efêmero recreates the silhouette of a city train on a monumental scale as it projects itself through the local context along an imaginary voyage on a Milan train carriage.
The Os Gemeos, Brazilian twins Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo, were born in 1974 in São Paulo, with a Calabrian grandfather in their family tree.
With training based in hip-hop culture and “wildstyle” graffiti, this artistic duo has brought the culture of street “writing” into major international museums,developing a refined, recognizable style beginning in the 1980s.
Characterized by the presence of generic landscapes and poetic figures, the work of Os Gemeos draws on a vast range of cultural, social and political references, as well as the colours, nature and urban context of São Paulo.
The project at Pirelli HangarBicocca delved deeper in to the artist’s unique universe of mysterious symbolism and alternative realities. It explored the history and spectacular architectural setting of Pirelli HangarBicocca, using the site as a starting point for an iconic new production.
The mural was not only be painted on the buildings facade but be incorporated into the buildings architecture. This is an ongoing theme in the artists work, to create murals that transform the facade of a building into a new structure.
Genuinely loving their work and believing in what they do, the brothers once again placed numerous details in their work including the pattern on the bag made from logos of all the world’s major metro systems,
Also a small nod was given via a small badge as a nod to a local Italian boy who died on April 13th, shortly after graffitiing a train in Milan, ( see bottom of this page for a touching story on this )
As well as a massive graffiti piece dedicated to their mother, Margarida.
Shaped as a subway car, the building was a perfect setting to re-creating their iconic images of young graffiti vandals climbing trains and leaving their aerosol marks.
Filled with patterns, vibrant colors and countless details that tell stories, this complex piece shows their diversity and talent on so many different levels – from realistic representation of a train with all the technical details, to their unmistakable character, and all the way to the enormous version of an old school train graffiti on the side.
The project is accompanied by a limited edition catalogue designed by the artists.
The book explore further the artists history of architectural interventions and include images of their works that have repurposed the built environment.
Curated by artist and writer Cedar Lewisohn – who has authored many publications on art, and curated the exhibition “Street Art at Tate Modern” in 2008
Work in Progress
The Brazilian street artist twins Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, spent 20 days ( some during the Salone ), working on the impressive fresco showing one of their characters hanging on the back of a subway carriage.
But so much effort, as revealed by the title ” Efêmero “, is destined to ultimately disappear .
The mural will not be protected from the weather or maybe it will be restored and even deleted within a year to make way for the next star of ” Outside the Cube ”
Official Opening & Launch
The project was officially revealed to the press on the 20th of April, with both Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo introducing their work along with Pirelli’s CEO Marco Tronchetti Provera.
The public opening was scheduled later in the day with musical performances, including a DJ set by one of the artists.
About Os Gemeos ( twins ) – Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo
Os Gemeos is a Portuguese word meaning the twins.
These duo street artists are identical twin brothers who were born as Otavio Pandolfo and Gustavo Pandolfo in 1974.
They were born in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Os Gemeos began their careers by being involved in spray-painting graffiti in 1987. Slowly but surely they began to gain large recognition in the underground urban scene.
As their influence spread across the graffiti urban community they began to help define Brazil’s very own unique style. Their style evolved around traditional hip-hop style and the Brazilian culture.
As time progresses, their work involved complicated murals, family portraits, commentary on Sao Paulo’s social and political circumstances, and even Brazilian folklores.
octavio and gustavo
Barry McGee helped influence Os Gemeos’ street art and their life were never be the same after their encounter. During this encounter, Barry McGee shared graffiti techniques and other experience.
Soon after 12oz Prophet Magazine create an interview on them. Soon Os Gemeos’ fame began to rise.
This was the first time their work began to hit audiences outside of South America.
vancouver 2014
Os Gemeos is known worldwide and they are perhaps best known for the yellow-skinned characters.
They have also done various large scaled public commissioned works, often in the buildings in the form of large murals.
boston 2012
Os Gemeos’ design inspiration is derived from reflections on their inner reality and surrounding fantasy. They use their imagination’s wings to go to exotic destinations and illusory places that inhabit their minds.
brazil world cup
lisbon
lisbon
Gemeos Art Gallery Showings
Boston
Banksy and Os Gêmeos
Dedicated to Slav – Not to add insult to injury
di Alessandro Riva
The show and the reality. The chic style of street art, new art form (the one that is in fashion, then that begins to please everyone, without distinction, because what they like in chic laps like at all ) and ” beast with a billion feet, “as Tom Wolfe called the ugly beast, reality precisely: one where you suffer, you struggle, you are anxious, you love. And he dies.
To understand: the train painted by Brazilian duo Os Gemeos for the Hangar Bicocca, the Milan Museum of Contemporary Art that more chic you can not (mural that will be inaugurated with great fanfare on Wednesday, April 20), and the train , right, made of iron and sheets, under whose wheels died crushed, last night, 13 April, a boy, writer and lover of skateboarding:
Svyatoslav Naryshev, said Slav, Russian origin (St. Petersburg) lived his life in Sesto San Giovanni, and the afternoons spent in the square opposite the Central Station, where for some time there are skaters in and around Milan.
Dead, he should say, on the field: that just as he crossed the tracks after painting a graffiti on the wall of the railway together with a friend, also a writer (wounded in the leg).
Now, the street art has been cleared, there is (we were among the first of us, Sdoganarla in Italy, with the exhibition Street Art Sweet Art, the Pac ten years ago: So we do not moan over); that even the most chic tours, museums / no international museums, acclaimed unconditionally from all newspapers and all the critics, such as the Hangar Bicocca, although ten years ago you would not have dreamed of even by mistake of giving one or space a shred of wall with a writer, let alone one Italian (it took two Smoking Barrels like me and like Sgarbi put together to give the outer wall of a museum like the Pac in Blue, street artists very Italian, but you sensed even then would go far; and yet no one in the official press release tail and conformist as always, has ever dreamed of riconoscercelo but better this way, credits and enticements of the system and the press will come only when you are boiled and not worth anything, or if you are colluding and rotten to the core); that, therefore, even the most chic tours and museums / no international museums and à la page sdoganino the phenomenon of graffiti and street art, creating walls to paint a large international street artists (for some reason, though, why no one Italian , but okay), there is also this: is part of the game.
It is the system, beauty.
But faced with the tragic parody, or the dreadful inevitability, of a large street artist duo who come to Milan to paint for a large institution, if not the public semi-public, like the Hangar Bicocca, and are found to paint l ‘ symbolic image of a boy with attached hoodie, clinging to a whisper as we sometimes cling to a breath in this life, against the cab of a moving train, and paint it in just the same time as a boy of nineteen years, even a dozen kilometers from that same place, under the train tracks we finished really, for wanting to leave its trace to the city, for having wanted to give a painting that large institutions will never bring them proudly on their posters and their message boards, because they already have the “great artists” to look after – well, in front of this fatality, so tragic, and so fiercely, symbolic plastically, we launch a modest proposal for Os Geminos and Hangar Bicocca: that, at least , the wall of the train is dedicated to Svyatoslav said Slav.
Naryshev Svyatoslav, said Slav, at the center, surrounded by his friends skaters.
Not to add insult to injury.
The mockery of institutions that are beautiful, now, with the fatigue, the pain, the anonymous suffering of tens of thousands of boys like Svyatoslav, who for years have climbed bridges, airports, railways, holes of the underground, braving beatings, chases, complaints and even the risk of death, and today have to see nothing but a handful of dealers, of complacent journalists, critics who until yesterday were never interested in anything beyond their noses and what they passed the monastery, short of unscrupulous businessmen who collect the fruits that their long and painful history.
That that wall is at least dedicated to Slav, then.
And that, at the opening, in front of the mural that celebrates a culture that art jocks believe it is simply a fact of fashions, trends and money, and instead continues to live on the skin of millions of children in all the suburbs of Italy, they are not all there abboffarsi of canapes and drank the usual sparkling and exchange the usual futility on the art system, but think for a moment – just a moment – to Svyatoslav and all those like him, who in ‘public art really believed it.
And finally, that the earth will be mild, Svyatoslav, the guy you loved writing and skateboarding
