Gert & Uwe Tobias: Grisaille

The twins Gert and Uwe Tobias are among the most famous German artists in the field of printed graphics, and to this day their inimitable signature remains as radical as ever. Their large-format woodcuts, luminous collages, and nuanced typewriter drawings are frequently characterized by exuberant imagination, craftsman-like perfection, and humorous depth, and their most recent group of works, Grisaille, is in keeping with the creative and entertaining pieces we’ve come to expect from them.

In Grisaille, created exclusively for an exhibition at the Staatlichen Graphischen Sammlung in Munich, the artists reinvigorate the centuries-old technique of “grey-in-grey painting,” while simultaneously interpreting it in a fresh manner through woodcuts. Presenting a twilight, monochrome color scheme hitherto unseen in their work, the realm of shadows in their fabulous pictorial inventions is at once ambiguous and extreme. Richly illustrated with eighty color plates, this book presents a critical addition to their oeuvre.