Gert & Uwe Tobias

Gert and Uwe Tobias are a Romanian artistic duo and identical twins, best known for their colorful, abstract woodcut prints and paintings. In many of their works, the artists combine the media of woodblock printing, typewriters, ceramics, and watercolor, creating a layered effect on the surface of the canvas. Influenced by Romanian culture and Modernist painting, the pair often link the seemingly disparate traditions of regional folk tradition and canonical art history. “We both work in many mediums, from ceramics to drawing,” Gert has said. “Every piece we produce is made by just one of us, but we both sign it at the end.” .

The Romian twin brothers draw on their Easter-European heritage to create canvases that border between folk-surrealism and geometric abstraction. Their works are often playful, largescale woodcut prints that play with pattern, domestic imagery and typography. The ensuing tableux feature figures, dismembered and splayed across the canvas. This macabre subject is seemingly anachronistic yet threads together themes from thoughout the history of art, including the tradition of vanitas, modernism and print-making itself.

They brothers have had solo exhibitions in the US at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2012, the artists had solo museum shows at FRAC Auvergne, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and Der Kunstverein Hamburg. Solo shows have also been mounted at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway, the Kunsthalle Wien, and the Franz Gertsch Museum in Switzerland..