Gilbert & George met as art students in 1967; and their entire life and career since then “can be seen as a single piece of performance art”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Now in their 80s, George Passmore (born in Plymouth in 1942) and Gilbert Prousch (born in northern Italy in 1943) project a carefully cultivated image as “crusty but lovable eccentrics”, who live in the same east London house they moved into in 1968, still dine at the same restaurant every night, and vote Tory to “wind up the liberal-left-veering art establishment”.
Nor has their art changed much: since the 1980s, they have been producing large-scale, brightly coloured photo works composed across multiple panels. Usually featuring the artists themselves posing amid the “detritus of the East End streets”, they’re a bizarre collision between “faux-medieval stained glass and hyper-contemporary street art”. But this exhibition of 60-plus pieces made since 2000 shows that their more recent work has become “more complex, fluent and multidimensional”, with a “dazzling” interplay of imagery reminiscent of Hindu art. They may be pensioners, but their art feels “quite hectically of the moment”.
The tone is “lurid, provocative” and “profoundly odd”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. It’s like walking through a “bewildering amusement arcade or bazaar”, full of synthetic colours and images of street debris – nitrous-oxide capsules, pornographic flyers, adverts for faith healers. In the middle of all this appear Gilbert & George, staring out deadpan or adopting “hammy poses”, playing witness to “modernity’s follies”. Taken individually, the best of the works are “powerful”, “radical” and – as is the case with “Bed-Wetting” (2019) – even beautiful. But seeing so many of the works together dulls their impact and feels overwhelming: “by the end, I felt as if I’d been hosed down with radioactive slurry”.
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Gilbert & George are “scabrous chroniclers of London in the tradition of Hogarth”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “Like him, they dive into the dirty alleys of a city that can be brutal and they come up laughing at it all.” All human life is here: sex, race, murder, religion (which “gets their goat”). Surreal newspaper headlines blare out at us: “LIFE AFTER DEATH PROVED”. “VICAR FIGHTS BROTHEL CLOSURE”, for example, is a particular “gem”. You’ll be “carried along in a rush of cheeky provocations and ludicrous juxtapositions of word and image”. “Ages” (2001) shows the pair blandly smiling on a red and yellow slab, surrounded by adverts for sex workers: “SKINHEAD JOE, 26. East End/10 mins. Liverpool St. Administers firm service.” It makes you laugh, but it also makes you wonder about the lives of these men. “Some sophisticates may be a bit sick of their antics, but to rip off Dr Johnson on London itself – to be tired of Gilbert & George is to be tired of life.”
Until 11 January. Hayward Gallery, London SE1; southbankcentre.co.uk
