BmoreArt

For most people, OSGEMEOS exemplify innovative street artists who have catapulted into the elitist circles of the “art world”. For me, they raise some interesting questions about identity, the nature of creativity, and the subsummation of ego in pursuit of something larger than yourself.

Their Hirshhorn survey Endless Story is massive, filling the entire third floor of the museum with almost 1,000 artworks, photos, and archival materials. It opens with an origin story and chronology that briefly dips into the brothers’ twinhood. When they were in elementary school, they separately drew an identical street scene in an art contest and were both awarded first prize.

Growing up in the ‘80s in São Paulo, the Pandolfo brothers were drawn into breakdancing, DJing, and the balloon-letter graffiti styles of New York City that wended their way south. The exhibition includes artifacts from their early days, including photos of their breakdancing crew, a hand-painted jean jacket, and their first boom box and mixer. There’s even a white track suit inspired by L.L. Cool J that was made from a terry-cloth bath towel by their grandmother.

Some of their later work pays nostalgic homage to that formative time. A 2011 painting named for a São Paulo metro stop, “Jabaquara,” features two young masked men carrying bags of spray paint near the subway tracks at the station. The painting is behind a real chain-link fence with a hole cut through it, and one of the figures is turned toward the viewer with a raised middle finger.  

Another painting called “1980,” which was created 40 years later in 2020, shows three young men, one armed with a can of Krylon spray paint, hanging off a tagged New York subway car.

The brothers are known worldwide for their distinctive yellow cartoonish human figures with large heads, spindly limbs, tiny eyes, and a Simpsons-esque yellow skin tone meant to transcend races and borders. The characters belong to an evolving mystical and harmonious universe called “Tritrez” which the brothers have been expanding since they were kids in São Paulo. 

The exhibition revels in OSGEMEOS’s wide range of mediums because they do it all. Paintings, sculpture, Joseph Cornell-ish boxes, and even a latch-hook rug self portrait with the bearded brothers spinning records. A giant zoetrope that creates the illusion of a flipping naked yellow man fills one room. In another gallery, viewers can peer through the façade of a building into a living room filled with artwork, a grandfather clock, and a lighted head lying under a gauzy sheet on a bed.

Another sculpture features a life-size naked yellow man inside a rainbow-hued cone who is getting beamed up to a UFO hanging from the ceiling. And there’s a weird altar with another naked yellow man (there’s a lot of them) unzipping his head and chest to reveal a luminous blue figure hidden beneath.

While the exhibition is comprehensive, it can’t convey the epic scale of OSGEMEOS’s murals and public installations. It’s one of the insurmountable challenges for museums to contain the grand work of street artists inside sanitized white-walled galleries that lack the grit, noise, and bustle of the streets.

On a trip to Vancouver, I happened upon a huge installation by OSGEMEOS with six of their signature figures painted in the round on 60-foot-tall silos. It was so surprising and inspiring that it still springs to mind years later even though other memories of that trip have faded.

In a video from the 2014 Vancouver Biennale when the mural was created, one brother says, “It doesn’t matter if I’m Gustavo and he’s Otavio, or if he’s Gustavo and I’m Otavio.” Then the other brother says, “It’s just a name.” One brother adds, “I know what he’s thinking and he knows what I’m thinking.”

For better or worse, OSGEMEOS epitomizes the twin stereotypes that I railed against growing up. Let’s rattle them off. Twins aren’t individuals, just two halves of one two-headed whole. Twins should constantly hang out together like in those 1980s Double Mint gum commercials. We’re supposed to complete each other’s sentences because of our freakish mind-melding abilities. People sometimes asked me if I could read my brother Darren’s mind, and I was never sure if they were joking.

But twin complaints aside, OSGEMEOS’s work is largely inventive and whimsical, like stepping into a dream or a comforting alternate universe. While their work spans a wide range of mediums, it has a narrowly focused and finely honed style. Their massive murals capture attention and imagination standing on their own in urban landscapes. But when their smaller artwork is confined within a museum, the imagery begins to feel repetitive.

By the time I reached the last few galleries of this sprawling retrospective, the naked yellow men and subway scenes had blurred together in overlapping memories that started to look identical, like two bearded brothers from São Paulo. Still, those brothers, or the collective hive mind of “the twins,” have proven their artwork has staying power, whether their name is in ALL CAPS or not.