Gilbert & George: Jack Freak Pictures

Gilbert & George have been creating extraordinary large-scale pictures together for more than 40 years, continually broaching such socially loaded topics as religion, sexuality and racial discrimination in their own visually arresting style. With over 150 color illustrations, this publication documents the artists' recent series Jack Freak Pictures, their largest sequence to date. The Jack Freak Pictures focus on the British national flag, the Union Jack, examining all of its connotations-from national pride and pageantry to Cool Britannia, football and even civic disobedience. Attiring themselves in medals and amulets and casting themselves against London street scenes, maps and the zinging red, white and blue of the national flag, Gilbert & George are once again not only the creators, but also the inhabitants of their own brash visual world. For this vivaciously designed monograph, novelist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell supplies an introduction, in which he allies Gilbert & George to a lineage of independent-minded London visionaries.