On a recent afternoon, the artists Gilbert & George stepped out of their 18th century London mansion in identically sized tweed suits and set out for a stroll through the bustling streets of the city’s Spitalfields area.
The pair – Gilbert Prousch, 79, and George Passmore, 81 – strolled past a Bangladeshi sweet shop and a group of delivery men delivering food near a mosque. tourists on a historical walking tour.
“It’s so exciting to be in the middle of this, don’t you think?” said Gilbert.
Thanks to their eccentric way of life – the two are rarely seen apart, dressing similarly and getting off each other’s thoughts – Gilbert & George have been among Britain’s most recognizable artists for decades and have presented exhibitions in major cities, including Moscow and New York. But on the streets of Spitalfields, the East London neighborhood where the artists have lived and worked together since the 1960s, they barely caught a glance.
Just a few minutes from their home, Gilbert & George turned onto Heneage Street and stopped in front of No. 5A. There, behind an iron gate emblazoned with the letters “G & G” in a swirling font, was The Gilbert & George Centera museum that opens to the public on Saturdays that they hope will immortalize their work and its part in the area’s history.
Spitalfields “is the center of the universe,” George said. “Some artists feel like they have to move to get inspired,” added Gilbert, “but we never felt like we needed to.”
Gilbert & George are known for their provocative artwork, which is at odds with wider trends. In the late 1960s, when many British artists were drawn to abstraction, the two declared themselves a living sculpture whose every movement was art. They quickly made a name for themselves with a performance called “The Singing Sculpture”, in which they stood on a table in heavy bronze makeup and synced to a music hall number.
In the decades that followed, they moved from showcasing themselves in galleries to creating large photographic assemblages in a distinctive gaudy style. It featured the artists’ effigies, usually in stylized poses, alongside images of youths or homeless men from Spitalfields and things they saw on their daily walks in the neighborhood, including graffiti, discarded chicken bones and empty plastic drug bags.
Daniela Gareh, a director of White Cube, the art gallery, said that Gilbert & George were “true storytellers of London”. They were already such a part of the fabric of the city, she added, and the museum would make sure they would be there forever.
Gilbert said Spitalfields, with its narrow streets and cramped buildings, felt gloriously medieval at times. George said the area was an artistic hub long before they arrived. “Brick Lane is where Oscar Wilde bought his drugs,” he added, referring to the neighborhood’s main street, more recently famous for its curries and bagels.
They chose Spitalfields in 1968, George said, simply “because it was the cheapest place in London at the time”. (Houses on the street where they live now sell for millions of dollars.) At the time, Gilbert said, Spitalfields felt like “a Dickens movie — it was full of bums and drunks.”
Within a decade, the pair incorporated some of that local character into their art. Gareh, the director of White Cube, said a key example of this was:The Dirty Words Pictures”, a 1977 collection that juxtaposed stark black-and-white images of foul-mouthed slogans scribbled on local walls with images of street protests. Gilbert & George “always had their finger on London’s socio-cultural pulse,” said Gareh.
They were also avid catalogers of their own work, preserving copies of many pieces and the photographs used to construct them. But Gilbert said the idea of a museum came about more by chance than by design. About a decade ago, the artists were looking for storage space when the building on Heneage Street – a 200-year-old former brewery with a quaint courtyard, next to a pub and opposite a Thai spa – came up for sale. The pair decided that the building would work perfectly as a museum, anything but guaranteeing that their photos would always be on display.
They said they bought the site for £5 million, about $6 million, and then spent a further £6 million turning it into the sleek three-room exhibition space. They aim to keep admission to the museum free, Gilbert said, and George added that they raised funding for it by selling prints of their works. “Art for everyone” was their philosophy, they said.
The Gilbert & George Center will rotate its displays once or twice a year, Gilbert said. The artists will curate exhibitions themselves, he added, as it only took them “five minutes” to decide what to show and how. “You put the big pictures on the big walls and the smaller ones on the small walls,” he said. “That’s about it.”
Before the opening, Gilbert & George show “The paradise pictures”, a set of 25 trippy works in which they – or their disembodied eyes – form a collage using images of rotting leaves, petals and discarded fruit the couple found while walking through Spitalfields, photographed in the studio and brought together using image editing software.
Although they represented Britain at the 2005 Venice Biennale, and have 26 works in the collection of the Tate museum group, Gilbert & George still see themselves as outsiders in the British art world and despise its gatekeepers. George recalled that when teachers were students at St. Martin’s School of Art, in the 1960s, they rejected their work. British journalists and art critics had been extremely harsh on them, he added.
“We were discriminated against and we had to fight like dogs,” said Gilbert. “We wanted to win,” he added, and with the museum, “I think we did.”