Catalogue of the quadruple major retrospective exhibition celebrating Gilbert & George's one-of-a-kind half century of creating art together: an overview of their practice, featuring a selection of historical pictures deemed by the artists themselves as the most representative of their art and life, and five new interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Daniel Birnbaum.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Luma, Arles, in 2018-2019, Moderna museet, Stockholm, in 2019, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, in 2019-2020, and Reykjavík Art Museum, in 2020.
Gilbert & George are Gilbert Prousch (born in South Tyrol, Italy, 1943) and George Passmore (born in England, 1942). They live and work in London.
For the last 40 years the artistes have spanned
the international art scene with as much insolence
as elegance. Real living sculptures, they have developed
a repetitive language around recurrent figures
and themes: shit, piss, blood tears, nudity, sperm,
alcohol, drugs.
Theirs is an oeuvre that has radically overturned
conventions and thinking of the period, and which
refers literally to homosexuality, exclusion, social
and religious violence.
