ART CAR BOOT FAIR E1 27.5.12

The Girls are English art duo Andrea Blood and Zoë Sinclair, whose collaboration began in 1996 at Central Saint Martins, after meeting at school aged 16. After a seven year hiatus, The Girls began making new work in 2006. The Girls' practice focuses on creating private staged tableaux and recording them as self-portrait photography or video, and performance. Themes explored include childhood, gender, feminism, women’s relationship with food and Englishness.

The Girls have exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery, the ICA, the National Portrait Gallery, curator Julia Royse's POSTED Projects, PayneShurvell, the Art Car Boot Fair, Aubin Gallery, Beverley Knowles Fine Art, Millais Gallery, Golden Thread Gallery (Belfast), LACDA (Los Angeles) and UNO+UNO (Milan).

‘The Girls Studio’ at Tate Britain was a special commission as part of Loud Tate 2010, ‘SUPERminitinyBIG’, in response to the Tate’s ‘Rude Britannia’ exhibition. In collaboration with The Photographers' Gallery, The Girls were artists-in-residence at Selfridges' Ultralounge, London, in 2010, publishing 3 issues of their own 1980's inspired photo-story magazine, ‘The Paper Eaters’. In 2011 The Girls directed 'The Grand Grotesque Parade', a reimagining of a forgotten Edwardian carnival, a special commission for the inaugural Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival; the collaboration with associate directors We 3, and Ali Sharpe's choir involved over two hundred participants and was seen by thousands.


THE PHOTOGRAPHERS' GALLERY 'Imagine Cecil Beaton's theatrical excess combined with the inspired imagination and DIY aesthetic of the doyenne of British colour photography of the 1930's, Madame Yevonde, and you have the wonderful rich narrative world of The Girls.' Brett Rogers, Director

LONDON EVENING STANDARD 'Sexy, irreverent post-feminism. Think Angela Carter crossed with Cindy Sherman.' Liz Hoggard

TIME OUT LONDON 'Seriously weird.'

AMELIA'S MAGAZINE 'Colourful and playful with a rumbling of darkness ensures childhood naivety is undercut by a dramatic and slightly haunted adult perspective.' Tanya Geddes

LOVE IS THE LAW MAGAZINE 'Imagine a quintessentially English answer to Cindy Sherman, but double, and with something of the wit and chemistry of French and Saunders distilled by a camera.' Herbert Wright

SELFRIDGES 'The Girls are re-inventing photographic story-telling in the most fun and irreverent way.' Linda Hewson, Head of Creative

LE COOL MAGAZINE 'The Girls dress as nurses or baroque courtesans, they pose in big photos staged like Jeff Wall pieces, but sillier. Their photostory about the Cinderella slipper is a laugh. Life-size straw dolls in bed explore female relationships. Get into their mental bed and indulge in a strange, funny, guilty visual feast.'

LONDONIST '..sometimes attractive, sometimes disturbing and sometimes humorous. Some of the photographs are good enough to eat, but they sufficiently highlight some of the less palatable issues about the place of women in visual culture.' Chloe George

Copyright © 2007-2012 The Girls, Andrea Blood and Zoë Sinclair. All rights reserved by the artists. TheGirls.co.uk