New Date: “OSGEMEOS: Endless Story” To Open Sept. 29
April 26, 2024
New Date: “OSGEMEOS: Endless Story” To Open Sept. 29
First US Museum Survey and Largest US Exhibit of Artwork by Brazil’s OSGEMEOS Will Showcase Almost 1,000 Artworks, Sept. 29, 2024–Aug. 3, 2025
The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden will open “OSGEMEOS: Endless Story” Sept. 29 rather than May 18 as originally scheduled. Given the complexity and scale of the installation of almost 1,000 artworks including large, site-specific paintings, the museum and the artists have decided to grant themselves more to time to realize the exhibition.
“OSGEMEOS: Endless Story” is the first U.S. museum survey and largest U.S. exhibition of artwork by identical twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo, known globally as OSGEMEOS—Portuguese for “the twins.” The installation will be on view, Sept. 29, 2024–Aug. 3, 2025.
“OSGEMEOS: Endless Story” will fill the museum’s third-floor outer-circle galleries and Lerner Room with archival and site-responsive artworks. The exhibition is among the most ambitious in the Hirshhorn’s 50-year history. The presentation will bring together paintings, sculptures, immersive installations, photographs, and archival materials to highlight the artists’ uniquely collaborative and multidisciplinary practice inspired by their upbringing in Brazil.
The Hirshhorn will mark its 50th anniversary in October. In celebration of this milestone, the national museum of modern and contemporary art will host special events this summer that will culminate with the opening of “OSGEMEOS: Endless Story” Sept. 29.
“Endless Story” frames OSGEMEOS’s origin story in São Paulo with rarely seen early sketches 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 and dreams, 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 featuring OSGEMEOS’ trademark characters. Other highlights include a colossal handmade zoetrope devised in 2014 that, when activated, animates OSGEMEOS’ world in the spirit of pre-cinema days. In addition, more than 30 paintings from lenders across the U.S. demonstrate the breadth of the artists’ studio practice.
OSGEMEOS’ exhibition is the Hirshhorn’s inaugural “Studio Hirshhorn” program, an unprecedented digital initiative in which contemporary artists work with the museum to share their art- and exhibition-making process ahead of their openings. In advance of the exhibition, short original artist videos will be featured on the Hirshhorn’s website and social channels as well as on Hirshhorn Eye (Hi), the museum’s award-winning smartphone guide that uses image-recognition software in galleries and publications. OSGEMEOS’ participation in this initiative further deepens the Hirshhorn’s commitment to expanding access to artists’ voices.
“OSGEMEOS: Endless Story” is curated by Marina Isgro, associate curator of media and performance art at the Hirshhorn, with the support of CJ Greenhill Caldera, curatorial assistant.
The exhibition and accompanying catalog are supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Exhibition programming received federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the National Museum of the American Latino. The Hirshhorn is grateful to Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, Milan and London, for its support of the Hirshhorn’s 344-page catalog, the first major English-language monograph of OSGEMEOS’ work, co-published with Rizzoli.
About OSGEMEOS
OSGEMEOS (b. São Paulo, 1974; live and work in São Paulo), whose name means “the twins” in Portuguese, is 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 to share their dynamic and magical universe with the public. Combining historical and contemporary elements of Brazilian culture with graffiti, hip-hop, music, dreams 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 that, as twins, they claim to share. In addition to the 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. The use of doors, canvas and mirrors, both literal—they paint directly onto discarded doors and incorporate reflective surfaces into their works—and as motifs signal access to another realm or an entry point to the psyche, pulling viewers into their surreal and chimerical world.
About the Hirshhorn
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is the national museum of modern and contemporary art and a leading voice for 21st-century art and culture. Part of the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn is located prominently on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Its holdings encompass one of the most important collections of postwar American and European art in the world. The Hirshhorn presents diverse exhibitions and offers an array of public programs on the art of our time—free to all. The Hirshhorn Museum is open daily, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m. (except Dec. 25). For more information, visit hirshhorn.si.edu. Follow the museum on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
Image captions: Left: Portrait of OSGEMEOS © OSGEMEOS. Photo: Filipe Berndt. Right: OSGEMEOS, A deusa (The Goddess), 2019. Mixed media with gold leaf on MDF; 91 1/8 × 64 3/4 in. (231.4 × 164.4 cm). © OSGEMEOS. Photo: Filipe Berndt.
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