The Observer / The Guardian, October 31 2016
Sean O’ Hagan
Gentlemen by Karen Knorr review – eminently clubbable
“It is this conceptually driven play of image and words that makes Gentlemen such a mischievous meditation on the sanctity – and absurdity – of these male institutions and the people that inhabit them. The portraits and the texts are not what they initially seem, the former being art-directed by Knorr to be both “natural” and revealing, the latter being constructed from parliamentary speeches of the time, as well as quotations from contemporary news reports. The end result is a kind of visual and linguistic mimicry that echoes, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, the language, values and beliefs of the English aristocracy. Among them is the belief in primogeniture – the right by law of the firstborn son rather than daughter to inherit the parent’s estate. Being born male, then, is, as Knorr suggests, the first privilege from which all others flow.”

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