OSGEMEOS: Endless Story

The Hirshhorn Museum presents the first US museum survey and largest US exhibition of work by identical twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo (b. São Paulo, Brazil, 1974), known globally as OSGEMEOS—Portuguese for “the twins.” The yearlong, full-floor presentation brings together approximately 1,000 artworks, photographs, and archival materials to highlight the trajectory of their collaborative multidisciplinary practice, including the roots of their fantastical artistic language, inspired by their upbringing in urban Brazil. OSGEMEOS: Endless Story spotlights the artists’ playful combination of universal themes with magical elements drawn from their heritage, urban art and graffiti traditions, and shared imagination.

Featuring large-scale paintings on wood and canvas, monumental sculptures, and room-sized installations that incorporate light, movement, and music, Endless Story fills the Hirshhorn’s sweeping third-floor galleries. To highlight OSGEMEOS’s interest in fusing the real with the fantastic, central place is given to dreamlike worlds, including The Moon Room (2022), built specifically for exhibition spaces and featuring sound, colorful architecture, and custom wallpaper. The presentation also includes scores of rarely seen drawings illuminating the growth of OSGEMEOS’s creative practice, from the walls of their childhood home to freeways and building façades to global galleries, alongside documentation of their outdoor graffiti and murals.

Endless Story frames OSGEMEOS’s origin story in São Paulo and introduces Tritrez, a mystical universe the artists invented as children and continue to populate with their colorful imaginings and signature large-headed figures. Sources of inspiration, such as their mother’s embroidery, American hip-hop, breakdancing and graffiti, life, nature, dreams, and sci-fi and the supernatural, as well as music, feature throughout the galleries. Many works have never been shown outside Brazil, including The Tritrez Altar (2020), a vast rainbow-colored structure housing sculptures of OSGEMEOS’s trademark characters. Other highlights include a colossal handmade zoetrope devised in 2014 that, when activated, animates OSGEMEOS’s world in the spirit of precinema days. In addition, more than 30 paintings from lenders across the United States demonstrate the breadth of the artists’ practice.

OSGEMEOS: Endless Story is curated by Marina Isgro, Associate Curator of Media and Performance Art at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, with the support of Curatorial Assistant CJ Greenhill Caldera.

OSGEMEOS: Endless Story is supported by a generous grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Major support has been provided by Marc and Lynne Benioff and the Teplitzky Family, Thailand. Additional funding has been provided by Mike and Sue Rushmore, the Hirshhorn International Council, and the Hirshhorn Collectors’ Council. Exhibition programming has received federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the National Museum of the American Latino.

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OSGEMEOS (b. São Paulo, Brazil, 1974; live and work in São Paulo), whose name means “the twins” in Portuguese, are a collaborative art duo composed of twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo. As children, the brothers developed a distinct way of communicating through artistic language, but it was with the introduction of hip-hop culture in the 1980s that OSGEMEOS began to use art as a way to share their dynamic and magical universe with the public. Combining historical and contemporary elements of Brazilian culture with graffiti, hip-hop, music, and international culture, the artists have created an expansive body of work that includes murals, paintings, sculpture, site-specific installations, and video. They use a symbolic visual language often inspired by dreams, which, as twins, they claim to share. In addition to their use of bright colors and elaborate patterns, they are best known for their paintings featuring long-limbed figures with thin outlines, enlarged faces, and simplified features. Their use of doors, canvases, and mirrors, both literal—they paint directly onto discarded doors and incorporate reflective surfaces into their works—and as motifs, signals access to another realm or an entry point to the psyche, pulling viewers into their surreal and chimerical world.

Copublished by Rizzoli, the Hirshhorn’s fully illustrated 344-page exhibition catalogue features nearly 350 illustrations as well as original contributions by Marina Isgro, Alan Ket, Peter Michalski, and Marguerite Itamar Harrison, plus interviews with the artists by Jochen Volz and Melissa Chiu. The Hirshhorn is grateful for a generous grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and to Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London, and the Hirshhorn Collectors’ Council and Hirshhorn International Council, for their support of the book.