SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo are identical twins. They are also artists who create under the name Osgemeos, which means twins in Portuguese. They began with graffiti in Brazil in the 1980s. And today, they're known for brilliantly colored, large-scale illustrations that have appeared around the world - walls, trains, even an airplane. Now museums and galleries are embracing the Pandolfos, including the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., as NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: The Pandolfo brothers always play music while they're working.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLAIR: At the Hirshhorn, one brother is covering a gallery wall, floor to ceiling, with hundreds of words - graffiti-style - that say Osgemeos and "Endless Story," the name of the exhibition. Another is carefully outlining a face with black spray paint.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPRAY PAINT CAN SHAKING)
BLAIR: Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo recently turned 50, and they still look exactly alike. They say they've never needed words to communicate and that they've shared the same artistic vision for as long as they can remember.
GUSTAVO PANDOLFO: I know what he going to do. He know what I'm going to do by telepathy. We don't need to talk.
OTAVIO PANDOLFO: We are like one artist, so it's fine.
BLAIR: They were raised in a family of artists and art lovers in Sao Paulo. They discovered hip-hop when they were around 8 years old. They started break dancing. They saw their first graffiti in the mid-1980s, and then were mesmerized when they saw the New York artist Dondi writing on walls in the 1982 music video for the single "Buffalo Gals."
(SOUNDBITE OF MALCOM MCLAREN SONG, "BUFFALO GALS")
G PANDOLFO: So we fall in love with the hip-hop straight away. And we see how free we can go with graffiti and also how we can discover the city that we live, doing graffiti in the streets.
BLAIR: They tried rapping and wanted to dress the part. So they showed their grandmother a photo of LL Cool J.
G PANDOLFO: And we said, oh, you should dress like this. And we come to our grandmother and say, can you do that? And she did in two days, like crazy.
BLAIR: That outfit - a white-and-yellow tracksuit made from a bath towel - is on display at the Hirshhorn, along with more than 1,000 works that span their career - graffiti, giant murals of mystical landscapes, sculptures, a mechanical zoetrope. The show was curated by Marina Isgro.
MARINA ISGRO: They're definitely maximalists. Their paintings are extremely large, to the point where we had to construct these doors specially so that the tops could be removed so that we could wheel the paintings through. So I think the sense of scale comes from working outdoors on building facades.
BLAIR: Osgemeos murals can be found in public spaces all over the world, including Germany, India and their native Brazil. Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo love science fiction and imagining worlds beyond this one. They say art is both a portal and a mirror that helps them reflect on the cosmos and their identities as identical twins.
O PANDOLFO: We have these questions very early in our life. What's the reason to be here, to born together, two guys, twin brothers? You know, what we are here? We're here for what, to do what? We ask ourselves this, and we try to discover this.
BLAIR: Osgemeos' "Endless Story" is at the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MEZERG'S "ZARBO TEMPO")
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