"Sombre and crazed, stark and lurid, THE BEARD PICTURES confront us with a disquieting, troubled and unique vision of our modern times. Their temper conveyed through successive symbols -- ruins, barbed wire, burglar alarms, fencing, real and man-made acid house flora and fauna, the living and the dead, post-mark time capsules, war torn townscapes, a conglomeration of small ads, eerie candles and beards. With the grotesque cartoon-like bearded caricatures of Gilbert & George -- the unifying motif of these maddened paranoid fairy tale pictures is the image of the beard, pictorially extrapolated to the point of surreality. Secular and sacred, the throwback emblem of hip millennial youth as well as a mark of religious faith, the beard is depicted in THE BEARD PICTURES as both mask and meaning: a real and powerful sign of our times."--Cover.