Os Gemeos

Os Gemeos is a single authorship held by two brothers, and every source treats it that way. Lehmann Maupin calls them a collaborative art duo of twin brothers, and Marina Isgro, the Hirshhorn curator of their 2024 survey, said of them according to The Eagle, the student newspaper of American University: "They're completely in sync." For a collector this removes one question that haunts many partnership oeuvres, which brother made which passage. The sources never split the work between them, and a work is not described as by one of the two.

It also means the name is spelled several ways: Os Gemeos, Os Gemeos with a circumflex in Portuguese, OSGEMEOS in the gallery's capitals. Catalogue entries, lot titles and museum labels use all of them, and a search in one spelling will miss the others. The Hirshhorn, the Tate, Sotheby's and Christie's lots and the Mattress Factory page cited here use three different forms between them.

The earliest dates come from Wikipedia's account, which rests on the 2005 book Graffiti Brasil: graffiti from 1987, an interview in the US magazine 12oz Prophet in 1998, and, in the early 2000s, a Brazilian invitation to paint trains legally that raised their profile. Complex, quoting the twins' own captions, dates their first North American solo exhibition to 2003, Pavil at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco.

Before 2008 the record is mostly walls and invitations from abroad, plus one institutional solo that Lehmann Maupin lists for 2007, at Museum Het Domein in Sittard, the Netherlands. In 2005 the Berlin magazine Backjumps invited them to paint a house wall in Kreuzberg, according to the city of Berlin's own portal. Complex says Lord Glasgow invited them in 2007, with Nunca and Nina, to paint Kelburn Castle in Scotland; the project was meant to be temporary, and Complex adds that the owner later sought permission to keep it. By 2008 the Tate Modern had commissioned them, and the gallery shows followed.

From 23 May to 25 August 2008 the Tate showed Street Art, the museum's first commission to use its river facade, according to the Tate press release. Os Gemeos were one of six artists, with Blu, Faile, JR, Nunca and Sixeart; the curator was Cedar Lewisohn of Tate Media and the sponsor was Nissan Qashqai. Kuttner's 2015 article uses the Tate piece and the Sao Paulo giant of 2009 as its two case studies of how commissioning bodies and the press talk about street artists at the point of production and removal.

For the record of the artists, the Tate show is the earliest museum-run commission in the sources, and it is a group show in which the six artists share one display; no acquisition is recorded in the sources cited.

The Sao Paulo giant called O Estrangeiro (The Foreigner), commissioned by Sesc and authorised in November 2009 for the side of an eight-story building in the Vale do Anhangabau, was meant to stay for 30 days, Kuttner writes, and local officials then said the city's urban-landscape commission would let it stay until the building came down. According to the same article the building was demolished in early 2012, not without controversy.

The Boston mural of 2012, a 70 by 70 foot wall on the Dewey Square air intake made for the Institute of Contemporary Art, was announced by the ICA as temporary, to stay at least until 25 November 2012 and possibly up to 18 months. The Vancouver Biennale's Giants of August 2014, six silos on Granville Island, was reported in the Biennale's own post of 21 August 2014 as in progress; the sources cited do not say whether the silos were kept, so no plate of that work is used.

The pieces that are catalogued as lasting are the ones a custodian takes responsibility for. Google Arts and Culture lists the facade work under the Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo (MAM) partner page as Untitled, 2010, graffiti and varnish, an installation, with the origin given as a gift from Credit Suisse. The twins' own caption, quoted by Complex, says: "This museum invited us, in 2010, to paint its facade with the aim of creating a permanent mural."

The plates on this page are of two walls that are standing in public. The first is the MAM facade in Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, a wide, low painting in warm oranges and violet with a large sleeping face, a mushroom-haired girl in a blue panel on the left, rail tracks and small houses; three photographs by Andre Deak for the Arte Fora do Museu project, taken on 18 March 2011, show most of the wall and two details.

The second is Yellow Man, the house wall at Oppelner Strasse 3 beside Schlesisches Tor in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The city of Berlin's portal dates it to 2005 and the second Backjumps Live Issue, whose motto was to turn the city into a magazine; it describes the figure's green face as having faded to yellow, the orange shirt as now white and the red shoes as painted over by other writers. Inspiring City, which also gives 2005, listed it in June 2025 as one of Berlin's longest-standing murals.

Away from walls the work becomes paintings on panel and board, sculpture and immersive installations, and its provenance runs through Lehmann Maupin. The gallery's own page lists solo exhibitions at New York from 2020 (Portal, 10 September to 7 November 2020), Palm Beach (OSGEMEOS, 11 February to 13 March 2022), London (In the Corner of the Mind, 4 May to 18 June 2022), New York again (Cultivating Dreams, 22 June to 16 August 2024), Seoul (Portal of Dreams, 5 November to 28 December 2024) and The Open Window (23 April to 6 June 2026). The 2022 London page calls it the duo's fifth solo show with the gallery, and the gallery announced in August 2016 that Silence of the Music, opening 8 September 2016, was their first New York solo show with it.

The auction houses' lot pages repeat the same chain. Christie's lot 233, Come Together, 2016, lists Lehmann Maupin, New York, then the present owner as provenance. Sotheby's lot 633, Pupila / Pupil, 2021, acrylic and spray paint on panel, 160 by 200 centimetres, lists Lehmann Maupin, Palm Beach, and the February to March 2022 show there as its exhibition history.

Public price data on the pages read here is sparse. The Bonhams POP X Culture sale of 19 November 2024 had an Os Gemeos Untitled of 2010 as its leading lot; HENI News reports $58,400 including fees and premiums against a low estimate of $51,900, and says the work had been traded twice before. HENI does not publish the hammer price. Sotheby's lot page for Pupila / Pupil (Contemporary Day Auction, closed 16 May 2025) shows an estimate of 60,000 to 80,000 US dollars and shows no result, so none is recorded for it. The Christie's lot page for Come Together gives no price or sale date.

Prices for other lots are not in the cited sources.

The first US museum solo show was at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 1 August to 25 November 2012, 13 works, organised by Pedro Alonzo. A run of institutional solos follows in the dates the gallery gives: Frist Art Museum, Nashville (27 September 2019 to 12 January 2020, eight paintings and two sculptures, curator Mark Scala), the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh (Lyrical, 2018, curator Margery King), and then the Brazilian retrospective run.

That run began at the Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo, where OSGEMEOS: Segredos opened on 15 October 2020 as the museum's reopening show, with more than 1,000 items according to Hypebeast, notebooks from their early teens shown for the first time, and, according to CNN Brasil, nearly two years of planning from the twins' personal and professional archives. It went to the Museu Oscar Niemeyer in Curitiba (opened 18 September 2021, 850 items, curator Jochen Volz of the Pinacoteca) and, as Nossos Segredos, to the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro (12 October 2022 to 23 January 2023) and Belo Horizonte (22 February to 22 May 2023). CAC Malaga held When the leaves turn to yellow in autumn 2022. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington then held OSGEMEOS: Endless Story from 29 September 2024, curated by Marina Isgro, with nearly 1,000 works on the third floor, called their largest US exhibition in The Eagle's subtitle.

The cited sources give no catalogue raisonne, foundation or authentication board, and none says how a work is confirmed today. The duo's own website carried only an under-construction notice and a link to their Instagram account in November 2026. The auction lot pages for Christie's lot 233 and Sotheby's lot 633 name Lehmann Maupin as the first link in the provenance of those two lots.

For a wall, the custodian is the owner or commissioner: the Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo for the Ibirapuera facade. In Berlin the city's page names no commissioner and says only that the magazine Backjumps organised the project.

The 2020 Pinacoteca show was presented by the twins themselves as a first panoramic exhibition of their life and work. Otavio Pandolfo told CNN Brasil it was the first time they had staged an exhibition of that panoramic character, and the Parana state press office quoted Gustavo Pandolfo at the Curitiba opening saying they wanted to show their creative stages, including mistakes and successes. The show put early notebooks on view, according to Hypebeast. For anyone researching the earliest years of the work, the notebooks and archives shown in those rooms are a source whose location and custody are not stated on the pages read here, and an open question below says so.