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拍品专文
Offered from the prestigious collection of Antonio Homem Sonnabend, the present work belongs to Gilbert & George’s groundbreaking early series Dead Boards. Executed in 1976, it represents an intimate portrait of the duo in their home at 12 Fournier Street in London. Their immaculate suited forms emerge from the shadows, poised as if inspecting the wooden panelling that surrounds them. Layered with dark nuance, the series captures their mission to become ‘living sculptures’, posing as mannequins in the atmospheric interior of their Georgian home. First unveiled at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 1976, the work is the only example from the series of 21 in which the artists feature in every panel, its grid-like structure conjuring a window onto their world. It was subsequently included in Gilbert & George’s major retrospective at the Municipal Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1980, which travelled to the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the Kunsthalle Bern, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.
Gilbert & George’s residence at Fournier Street, near Spitalfields Market in London’s East End, became the base for a practice that would systematically blur the lines between life and art. The pair first began living in the house in 1968, renting the ground floor for £16 a month. ‘It was the cheapest part of London and also the most romantic part as well,’ explained Gilbert. ‘It was so incredible. The first time I went to the East End I felt as if I were in the nineteenth century. All around here it was like something out of Charles Dickens’ (in conversation with A. Wilson, ‘Gilbert & George’, Journal of Contemporary Art, 1993). Around the time of the present work, they were able to purchase the property outright, and began the colossal task of restoring it to its former glory. The house became an extension of their personae: the centre of their closeted universe, which revolved around elaborate daily rituals including eating in the same cafes and wearing the same clothes. Their practice, in turn, became a kind of social commentary: like outsiders from another world, they wryly observed the changes to London’s landscape throughout the Thatcher era and beyond.
In the Dead Boards, Gilbert & George reflect upon this shifting fabric, combining a sense of intimacy and Romanticism with an atmosphere of melancholy and material decay. ‘In the two upper images of Dead Boards No 19,’ writes Wolfgang Jahn, ‘they use their senses to perceive death at work amid the arid stillness. They are watching and listening to death’ (The Art of Gilbert & George or an Aesthetic of Existence, New York, 1989, p. 159). The artists, meanwhile, explain that ‘We think that the bleakness of Dead Boards is a feeling that exists in everybody to some degree. There is some part of the head, the soul and the sex of every person that can identify wherever they live in the world with those feelings. Very delicate, difficult things to talk about, even more difficult to make pictures about. But they do describe exactly the feeling that we had. We did isolate ourselves totally, we were alone, and we kept to that’ (The Words of Gilbert & George with Portraits of the Artists from 1968-1997, London, 1997, p. 293).
THE ANTONIO HOMEM SONNABEND LEGACY
For more than 50 years, Antonio Homem Sonnabend worked alongside the inimitable dealer, curator and collector Ileana Sonnabend, one of the most important figures in post-war European and American art. Together with Ileana’s husband, Michael, the three operated the eponymous Sonnabend Gallery, whose groundbreaking programming established it as one of the world’s most influential galleries of contemporary art. Simultaneously, they built a private collection that became the envy of their contemporaries, marked by Ileana’s pioneering vision and legendary knack for spotting talent.
After Ileana’s death in 2007, Antonio co-founded the Sonnabend Collection Foundation and dedicated his life to protecting and promoting the Sonnabends’ extraordinary legacy. This culminated in 2025 with the opening of the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, a dedicated museum for the collection with over 100 works on view, housed in Mantova’s medieval Palazzo della Ragione. In addition to being the guardian of the Sonnabends’ legacy, Antonio established his own collection, a selection that represents the extraordinary creativity that was to be found in Europe and America during this pivotal post-war period.
Ileana and Michael Sonnabend, along with Antonio Homem Sonnabend, built their reputation on acting as a catalyst, bringing together artists and patrons in a way that supported new and exciting conversations about art. They were promoters of the avant-garde and became intermediaries between artists working in a variety of media, so much so that their success became intertwined with the pivotal developments in contemporary art history from the 1950s through to the beginning of the 21st century.
Antonio Homem Sonnabend first met Ileana Sonnabend in 1965 while he was studying engineering in Zurich, Switzerland. Antonio had been interested in art since childhood, but his parents encouraged him to pursue a more established career path. While studying in Zurich, he lived above the art gallery owned by the legendary Bruno Bischofberger and indulged his passion by working part-time in the gallery. One evening, during a dinner to celebrate the opening of an exhibition of Pop Art, Antonio found himself sitting next to Ileana Sonnabend and so began a lifelong bond between the two. The pair struck up a conversation that would change his life, with Ileana and her husband Michael urging him to follow his heart and pursue his true passion—a career in the art world. ‘I must say that Ileana and Michael were very much the real parents for me,’ Antonio recalled, ‘in the sense that they did show me what I wanted and what I could be.’
By 1968, Antonio had moved to Paris and began working for the Sonnabends at the gallery they had established at 37 quai des Grands Augustins. Located close to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris’s intellectual heart, the gallery soon became the crossroads for new European and American art. It was the only place on the continent to show the burgeoning Pop and Minimalist art from the United States, while Ileana and Michael brought a new generation of European artists, including Jannis Kounellis and Mario Merz, to wider critical acclaim. The gallery reflected Ileana’s highly personal tastes and mirrored her belief that art was a holistic endeavor which should encompass one’s whole being. ‘I don’t think there was a great difference between Ileana’s home and the gallery,’ recalled Antonio. ‘We saw [the Sonnabends] really as an extension of our lives. We just loved them. They were just a part of our life…I never knew when I was working and when I wasn’t working. It was all one same thing.’
In 1970, after eight years in Paris, the Sonnabends and Antonio opened a new space in New York. Under Michael’s direction, and with the help of Antonio, who ran the day-to-day operations, the space at 924 Madison Avenue was devoted to bringing new European artists to New York’s Upper East Side. Among their first exhibitions were revolutionary shows dedicated to artists of the Arte Povera movement, including Giorgio Griffa and Mario Merz. In addition, the gallery featured works by numerous Californian artists who were relatively unknown in New York at the time, including John McCracken, Robert Graham, and Larry Bell.
In 1971 the gallery moved to a larger space in the heart of SoHo, at 420 West Broadway, with both Ileana and Antonio taking a more active role in the gallery’s programming. The inauguration of the new location was marked by the iconic performance work The Singing Sculpture (1969) by the English artistic duo Gilbert & George, setting the standard for programming that introduced Americans to European artists and did not shy away from the unusual. Ileana and Antonio also leaned into New York’s own avant-garde scene and embraced the work of artists who lived and worked in the SoHo neighborhood, including: Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, William Wegman, and Dan Graham.
During the 1970s, 420 West Broadway became the global epicenter of the contemporary art world. Following the Sonnabend's lead, other major art-world figures including Leo Castelli and André Emmerich also opened spaces at 420 West Broadway, migrating from the much more sedate environment of the Upper East Side. The architecture of the former industrial spaces in SoHo meant that artists could install large, experimental works that would not fit into the converted townhouses of the Upper East Side (in 1975 Jannis Kounellis famously used a freight elevator to bring a horse into Sonnabend’s 420 gallery space each day of his exhibition). These new galleries and their provocative programs did much to fuel interest in contemporary art, not just among collectors, but also among the general public, and the opening of each new exhibition would be a huge public event marked by hundreds of people spilling out of the galleries into the streets. Peter Reginato, an artist who lived and worked in SoHo at the time, recalled that there was 'an excitement in the air about art.'
In addition to the success of the galleries in Paris and New York, Ileana Sonnabend was quietly building an unrivalled collection of contemporary art, an endeavor in which Antonio was intimately involved. The breadth of the collection was immense, spanning geographical borders and historical movements, from American Pop Art and Italian Arte Povera to French Nouveau Réalisme and New York Neo-Expressionism. Today it has come to reflect the lasting contributions of the three figures most crucial to the success of the Sonnabend galleries. ‘I always said that the collection was an autobiography and an auto-portrait of Ileana, Michael, and of me… it’s a kind of distillation of our lives,’ Antonio noted in 2016.
Michael Sonnabend passed away in 2001, and upon Ileana Sonnabend’s death in 2007, Antonio became the guardian of her collection and her legacy. Until the gallery’s closure in 2014, he took over gallery operations to continue the Sonnabends’ ethos and mission and, alongside Sonnabend’s daughter, Nina Castelli Sundell, co-founded the Sonnabend Collection Foundation in 2009, dedicated to preserving and sharing works from the Collection with audiences around the world. In 2025, Homem Sonnabend secured a permanent home for the Foundation’s collection, and today works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Piero Manzoni and Jasper Johns, as well as others, are housed in the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, in the Palazzo della Ragione in the medieval city of Mantova in northern Italy.
In addition to his stewardship of the Sonnabend Foundation Collection, Antonio built on the passion and expertise he shared with the Sonnabends to amass his own personal collection. A near encyclopedic survey of the major movements of post-war Western art spanning multiple mediums, the collection contains exemplary examples by some of the most influential artists of their generation. In addition to paintings, sculpture, and works on paper, Homem Sonnabend’s collection also contains important examples of 20th-century furniture and design, including seminal examples of Art Deco.
An extraordinary print collection showcases works by many of the artists championed by the Sonnabend Gallery and illustrates Homem Sonnabend’s sophisticated eye and appreciation of the print-making process. Works by Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, among others, lead this group. A tightly curated group of photographs from the collection also includes premier examples by artists that helped shape not only early programming for the gallery, but also photography’s distinctive voice within the broader contemporary arts. Some of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s most impactful meditations on history, time, and the human experience, in the form of his seascapes, architectural abstractions and more have held a unique place in contemporary art since the 1980s. The association with Sonnabend’s early exhibition of these photographs continues to be a well-known and highly respected aspect of the work’s history.
Antonio and the Sonnabends believed in the power of art to transform the world and championed access to art for as many people as possible. Throughout their lives they lent works from their collections to museums and educational institutions worldwide, thereby supporting scholarship and increasing the visibility of modern and post-war art throughout the world. Through collaborations with leading organizations across Asia, Europe, the Americas, and South America, the works in their collections became foundational to countless international artistic exchanges and expanded access to one of the most emblematic bodies of work from the post-war period.
Ileana and Michael Sonnabend and Antonio Homem Sonnabend are today rightly regarded as being amongst the most consequential figures in European and American post-war art history. With their intelligence, foresight, and commitment to patronage, the trio succeeded in introducing American art of the period to a burgeoning European collector base, and vice versa. As Mario Codognato notes, 'Antonio Homem… accompanied [Ileana and Michael Sonnabend] step-by-step in all their achievements, all their decisions, sharing their intelligence, their desire to understand the present and envision the future through the works and ideas of artists.' Together, these three giants changed the course of Western art history as we understand it today.
Gilbert & George’s residence at Fournier Street, near Spitalfields Market in London’s East End, became the base for a practice that would systematically blur the lines between life and art. The pair first began living in the house in 1968, renting the ground floor for £16 a month. ‘It was the cheapest part of London and also the most romantic part as well,’ explained Gilbert. ‘It was so incredible. The first time I went to the East End I felt as if I were in the nineteenth century. All around here it was like something out of Charles Dickens’ (in conversation with A. Wilson, ‘Gilbert & George’, Journal of Contemporary Art, 1993). Around the time of the present work, they were able to purchase the property outright, and began the colossal task of restoring it to its former glory. The house became an extension of their personae: the centre of their closeted universe, which revolved around elaborate daily rituals including eating in the same cafes and wearing the same clothes. Their practice, in turn, became a kind of social commentary: like outsiders from another world, they wryly observed the changes to London’s landscape throughout the Thatcher era and beyond.
In the Dead Boards, Gilbert & George reflect upon this shifting fabric, combining a sense of intimacy and Romanticism with an atmosphere of melancholy and material decay. ‘In the two upper images of Dead Boards No 19,’ writes Wolfgang Jahn, ‘they use their senses to perceive death at work amid the arid stillness. They are watching and listening to death’ (The Art of Gilbert & George or an Aesthetic of Existence, New York, 1989, p. 159). The artists, meanwhile, explain that ‘We think that the bleakness of Dead Boards is a feeling that exists in everybody to some degree. There is some part of the head, the soul and the sex of every person that can identify wherever they live in the world with those feelings. Very delicate, difficult things to talk about, even more difficult to make pictures about. But they do describe exactly the feeling that we had. We did isolate ourselves totally, we were alone, and we kept to that’ (The Words of Gilbert & George with Portraits of the Artists from 1968-1997, London, 1997, p. 293).
THE ANTONIO HOMEM SONNABEND LEGACY
For more than 50 years, Antonio Homem Sonnabend worked alongside the inimitable dealer, curator and collector Ileana Sonnabend, one of the most important figures in post-war European and American art. Together with Ileana’s husband, Michael, the three operated the eponymous Sonnabend Gallery, whose groundbreaking programming established it as one of the world’s most influential galleries of contemporary art. Simultaneously, they built a private collection that became the envy of their contemporaries, marked by Ileana’s pioneering vision and legendary knack for spotting talent.
After Ileana’s death in 2007, Antonio co-founded the Sonnabend Collection Foundation and dedicated his life to protecting and promoting the Sonnabends’ extraordinary legacy. This culminated in 2025 with the opening of the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, a dedicated museum for the collection with over 100 works on view, housed in Mantova’s medieval Palazzo della Ragione. In addition to being the guardian of the Sonnabends’ legacy, Antonio established his own collection, a selection that represents the extraordinary creativity that was to be found in Europe and America during this pivotal post-war period.
Ileana and Michael Sonnabend, along with Antonio Homem Sonnabend, built their reputation on acting as a catalyst, bringing together artists and patrons in a way that supported new and exciting conversations about art. They were promoters of the avant-garde and became intermediaries between artists working in a variety of media, so much so that their success became intertwined with the pivotal developments in contemporary art history from the 1950s through to the beginning of the 21st century.
Antonio Homem Sonnabend first met Ileana Sonnabend in 1965 while he was studying engineering in Zurich, Switzerland. Antonio had been interested in art since childhood, but his parents encouraged him to pursue a more established career path. While studying in Zurich, he lived above the art gallery owned by the legendary Bruno Bischofberger and indulged his passion by working part-time in the gallery. One evening, during a dinner to celebrate the opening of an exhibition of Pop Art, Antonio found himself sitting next to Ileana Sonnabend and so began a lifelong bond between the two. The pair struck up a conversation that would change his life, with Ileana and her husband Michael urging him to follow his heart and pursue his true passion—a career in the art world. ‘I must say that Ileana and Michael were very much the real parents for me,’ Antonio recalled, ‘in the sense that they did show me what I wanted and what I could be.’
By 1968, Antonio had moved to Paris and began working for the Sonnabends at the gallery they had established at 37 quai des Grands Augustins. Located close to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris’s intellectual heart, the gallery soon became the crossroads for new European and American art. It was the only place on the continent to show the burgeoning Pop and Minimalist art from the United States, while Ileana and Michael brought a new generation of European artists, including Jannis Kounellis and Mario Merz, to wider critical acclaim. The gallery reflected Ileana’s highly personal tastes and mirrored her belief that art was a holistic endeavor which should encompass one’s whole being. ‘I don’t think there was a great difference between Ileana’s home and the gallery,’ recalled Antonio. ‘We saw [the Sonnabends] really as an extension of our lives. We just loved them. They were just a part of our life…I never knew when I was working and when I wasn’t working. It was all one same thing.’
In 1970, after eight years in Paris, the Sonnabends and Antonio opened a new space in New York. Under Michael’s direction, and with the help of Antonio, who ran the day-to-day operations, the space at 924 Madison Avenue was devoted to bringing new European artists to New York’s Upper East Side. Among their first exhibitions were revolutionary shows dedicated to artists of the Arte Povera movement, including Giorgio Griffa and Mario Merz. In addition, the gallery featured works by numerous Californian artists who were relatively unknown in New York at the time, including John McCracken, Robert Graham, and Larry Bell.
In 1971 the gallery moved to a larger space in the heart of SoHo, at 420 West Broadway, with both Ileana and Antonio taking a more active role in the gallery’s programming. The inauguration of the new location was marked by the iconic performance work The Singing Sculpture (1969) by the English artistic duo Gilbert & George, setting the standard for programming that introduced Americans to European artists and did not shy away from the unusual. Ileana and Antonio also leaned into New York’s own avant-garde scene and embraced the work of artists who lived and worked in the SoHo neighborhood, including: Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, William Wegman, and Dan Graham.
During the 1970s, 420 West Broadway became the global epicenter of the contemporary art world. Following the Sonnabend's lead, other major art-world figures including Leo Castelli and André Emmerich also opened spaces at 420 West Broadway, migrating from the much more sedate environment of the Upper East Side. The architecture of the former industrial spaces in SoHo meant that artists could install large, experimental works that would not fit into the converted townhouses of the Upper East Side (in 1975 Jannis Kounellis famously used a freight elevator to bring a horse into Sonnabend’s 420 gallery space each day of his exhibition). These new galleries and their provocative programs did much to fuel interest in contemporary art, not just among collectors, but also among the general public, and the opening of each new exhibition would be a huge public event marked by hundreds of people spilling out of the galleries into the streets. Peter Reginato, an artist who lived and worked in SoHo at the time, recalled that there was 'an excitement in the air about art.'
In addition to the success of the galleries in Paris and New York, Ileana Sonnabend was quietly building an unrivalled collection of contemporary art, an endeavor in which Antonio was intimately involved. The breadth of the collection was immense, spanning geographical borders and historical movements, from American Pop Art and Italian Arte Povera to French Nouveau Réalisme and New York Neo-Expressionism. Today it has come to reflect the lasting contributions of the three figures most crucial to the success of the Sonnabend galleries. ‘I always said that the collection was an autobiography and an auto-portrait of Ileana, Michael, and of me… it’s a kind of distillation of our lives,’ Antonio noted in 2016.
Michael Sonnabend passed away in 2001, and upon Ileana Sonnabend’s death in 2007, Antonio became the guardian of her collection and her legacy. Until the gallery’s closure in 2014, he took over gallery operations to continue the Sonnabends’ ethos and mission and, alongside Sonnabend’s daughter, Nina Castelli Sundell, co-founded the Sonnabend Collection Foundation in 2009, dedicated to preserving and sharing works from the Collection with audiences around the world. In 2025, Homem Sonnabend secured a permanent home for the Foundation’s collection, and today works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Piero Manzoni and Jasper Johns, as well as others, are housed in the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, in the Palazzo della Ragione in the medieval city of Mantova in northern Italy.
In addition to his stewardship of the Sonnabend Foundation Collection, Antonio built on the passion and expertise he shared with the Sonnabends to amass his own personal collection. A near encyclopedic survey of the major movements of post-war Western art spanning multiple mediums, the collection contains exemplary examples by some of the most influential artists of their generation. In addition to paintings, sculpture, and works on paper, Homem Sonnabend’s collection also contains important examples of 20th-century furniture and design, including seminal examples of Art Deco.
An extraordinary print collection showcases works by many of the artists championed by the Sonnabend Gallery and illustrates Homem Sonnabend’s sophisticated eye and appreciation of the print-making process. Works by Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, among others, lead this group. A tightly curated group of photographs from the collection also includes premier examples by artists that helped shape not only early programming for the gallery, but also photography’s distinctive voice within the broader contemporary arts. Some of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s most impactful meditations on history, time, and the human experience, in the form of his seascapes, architectural abstractions and more have held a unique place in contemporary art since the 1980s. The association with Sonnabend’s early exhibition of these photographs continues to be a well-known and highly respected aspect of the work’s history.
Antonio and the Sonnabends believed in the power of art to transform the world and championed access to art for as many people as possible. Throughout their lives they lent works from their collections to museums and educational institutions worldwide, thereby supporting scholarship and increasing the visibility of modern and post-war art throughout the world. Through collaborations with leading organizations across Asia, Europe, the Americas, and South America, the works in their collections became foundational to countless international artistic exchanges and expanded access to one of the most emblematic bodies of work from the post-war period.
Ileana and Michael Sonnabend and Antonio Homem Sonnabend are today rightly regarded as being amongst the most consequential figures in European and American post-war art history. With their intelligence, foresight, and commitment to patronage, the trio succeeded in introducing American art of the period to a burgeoning European collector base, and vice versa. As Mario Codognato notes, 'Antonio Homem… accompanied [Ileana and Michael Sonnabend] step-by-step in all their achievements, all their decisions, sharing their intelligence, their desire to understand the present and envision the future through the works and ideas of artists.' Together, these three giants changed the course of Western art history as we understand it today.