Gilbert & George 'The 21st Century' HPM Edition Available

Artist: Gilbert & George
Title: The 21st Century
Medium: Hand Painted Multiple
Size: 70 x 100 cm
Edition: 50 (UNIQUE)
Price: £2,500

 

Gilbert & George are the self-declared “living sculptures,” a British-Italian duo who have fused their lives and art into one continuous, formaldehyde sharp spectacle since meeting at St. Martin’s School of Art in 1967. Gilbert Proesch (b. 1943, South Tyrol) and George Passmore (b. 1942, Devon) abandoned the idea of separate studio practice, instead appearing together always in matching tweed suits, regimented haircuts and sober ties performing slow motion songs under gallery lights, declaring themselves both subject and object. Early works like The Singing Sculpture (1969) and the drunken confessional video Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk established their dead-pan, moral-aesthetic tone: propriety cracked by bodily impulse.

In the 1980s they swapped live performance for monumental, hand-colored photo-montages stained with blackened reds and bilious yellows. Series such as The Pictures juxtapose East End skinheads, graffiti-scrawled walls, crucifixes, and their own blank faces, confronting Thatcher era racism, homophobia and urban decay with a stained-glass grandeur borrowed from Victorian hymnals. Critics called it bombastic; Gilbert & George replied, “We want our pictures to hit you like a punch in the gut.”

Four decades of sunrise walks through Spitalfields have stocked an ever-growing archive of street detritus beer cans, flyers, bodily fluids scanned, tiled and blown up to cathedral scale. The artists remain inseparable, dining together nightly and refusing vacations, insisting that every conversation, hangover or newspaper headline is potential material. Their art now sits in Tate Modern, the Guggenheim and MoMA, yet they still greet visitors personally at White Cube openings, twin gatekeepers of an empire built on equality, eccentricity and the unshakeable belief that two polite gentlemen in suits can be the most shocking spectacle of all.