Out Spotlight LXII

Today's Out Spotlight are the artists Gilbert & George.

Gilbert Proesch was born in San Marino, Italy, in a village located in the Dolomite Mountains, in 1943. His father was a shoemaker and he trained as a woodcarver in his father's workshop. Gilbert later went on to study at the Wolkenstein School of Art, the Hallein School of Art in Austria, and the Akademie der Kunst in Munich.

George Passmore also comes from a working class family. Born in Plymouth, Devon in 1942, he was raised in Tiverton. He left school to work in a shop when he was fifteen years old and eventually studied at the Darlington Adult Education Center in Devon and the Darlington Hall College of Art.

George first met Gilbert Proesch on 25th September 1967 while studying sculpture at St Martins School of Art, London. The two claim they came together because George was the only person who could understand Gilbert's rather poorly spoken English. In a 2002 interview with the Daily Telegraph they said of their meeting: 'it was love at first sight'. It is widely assumed that Gilbert & George are lovers, although they always dismiss questions about their sex lives.

They were initially known as performance artists. While still students they made The Singing Sculpture (1970), for which they covered themselves in gold metallic paint, stood on a table, and mimed to a recording of Flanagan and Allen's song Underneath the Arches, sometimes for hours at a time.

A number of works from the early 1970s consisted of the two of them getting drunk, usually on gin. Smashed (1973) was a set of photographs documenting a drunken evening, while Gordon's Makes Us Drunk is a film of the pair drinking Gordon's gin and listening to Elgar and Grieg, occasionally saying Gordon's makes us very drunk' or a slight variant thereof. This work, in common with many others by Gilbert and George, is executed in a completely deadpan way.

The matching business suits which they wore for these performances became a sort of uniform for them, and they rarely appear in public unless wearing them. It is also virtually unheard of for one of the pair to be seen without the other. They refuse to disassociate their performances from their everyday lives, insisting that everything they do is art. The pair regard themselves as 'living sculptures'.The pair are perhaps best known for their large scale photo-montages, such as Cosmological Pictures (1993), frequently tinted in extremely bright colours, backlit, and overlaid with black grids so as to resemble stained glass windows. Gilbert & George themselves often feature in these works, along with flowers and youths, their friends, and echoes of Christian symbolism. The early works in this style were in black and white, with red and yellow touches in later series. Later these works moved to use a range of bold colours. Their 2005 work, Sonofagod, returned to a more sombre and darker palette.

Some series of their pictures have attracted media attention through including potentially shocking imagery, including nudity, depictions of sexual acts, and bodily fluids. In the 1980s, the artists began to create an increasing number of works with gay themes.

The anatomically explicit work entitled Hunger (1982) is illustrative of lust's urgency. This work presents two faces--one red with yellow highlights, the other, yellow with red highlights, painted in the same reversed patterning--engaged in fellatio. The red and yellow colors seem to speak of reciprocal, hot-blooded desire soon to be followed by the electric impulse of sexual climax.


Good (1983) makes a statement about the ambiguity of gay desire. This photographic work is overlaid against a gray-toned brick wall. A Latin cross, the central symbol of the Christian faith, is formed of over-lapping red roses, a Catholic symbol for the Virgin Mary. The rose is also a visual representation of the anus, locus of male-male sexual desire. Rose Hole (1980) uses the same sexual coding. In 1986 Gilbert and George attracted criticism from left-wing commentators for a series of works seemingly glamorizing 'rough types' of London's East End such as skinheads, while a picture of an Asian man bore the derogatory title 'Paki'.

They have been residents of Fournier Street, Spitalfields, East London for many years.

They won the Turner Prize in 1986, and represented the UK at the 2005 Venice Biennale.


Gilbert & George