Proesh was born in the Italian Dolomites and was
trained as a wood sculptor in his father’s shop. He
studied at the Wolkenstein School of Art in Italy,
the Hallein School of Art in Austria, and the Mu-
nich Academy before moving to London. Passmore
attended Darlington Hall College of Art and the
Oxford School of Art prior to his London studies.
He worked at the Selfridges Department Store and
was a barman before he got into Saint Martin’s.
According to tradition the two got together as
George was the only one who could understand
Gilbert’s poor English. Presumably their common
aversion to the elitist approach to art in general
and sculpture in particular at Saint Martin’s also
played an important role in the decision to go their
own way. They became one artist and were since
then hardly ever seen separately, neither in real life
nor in their art, in which they feature prominently.
At a time when the artistic community was won-
dering what options were left to explore, Gilbert
and George made the radical, but at the same time
the only possible choice: they turned life into art
and became their own subject matter. They pur-
chased a house, which they named ‘‘Art for All,’’ in
the working-class neighborhood of Spitalfields in
East London and declared that they were ‘‘living
sculptures.’’ As living (and singing) sculptures they
quickly made their name in the late 1960s and early
1970s. In these performances, which could some-
times last for hours, they took the stage dressed in
matching business suits with their hands and faces
bronzed. If they moved at all, it was in a mechan-
ical and hollow manner.
They appeared interchangeable and stripped
from any personality or imagination. In the best
known renditions of these sculptures they got
drunk or mimed to the music-hall songUnderneath
the Arches. These first performances, representing
loss of creativity, had an annoying and unpleasant
character. The photographic documentation of
some of the ‘‘drunk’’ pieces mimic the off-balance
stagger of a drunk; the black and white snapshot-
like images are presented willy-nilly across a mount-
ing board, as inSmashed, 1973.
Over the years Gilbert and George have ex-
pressed themselves through a number of mediums:
bookmaking, mail art, drawing, video, painting,
and photography, along with their trademark pub-
lic persona, which always had performance-like
qualities. Nevertheless Gilbert and George have
consistently referred to their work as sculpture,
stretching the traditional definition into a generic
term now in wide use in contemporary art. By giv-
ing up their separate identities and becoming both
artist and artwork, Gilbert and George realized a
notion in the avant-garde of the twentieth century
that had long been an ideal, that of erasing the
distinctions between life and art. Thus when artist,
artwork, and everyday life form a unity, it becomes
superfluous and even impossible to make a distinc-
tion between genres or mediums. Even so, their use
of photography has clearly changed over the years.
At first it served as a way to record their perfor-
mance sculptures and typically took the form of
modest black-and-white documents. Very soon
photography became their most important manner
of expression, and their large-scale photomontages,
bold in both color and subject matter, are a visual
language uniquely their own. The artists themselves
are the most important and only constant motif
in that language. Dressed in their characteristic
matching business suits, which they refer to as
their ‘‘responsibility suits of our art,’’ Gilbert and
George conspicuously appear in their work. Other
visual elements evolved and varied over the years,
but symmetrical compositions, the artists’conserva-
tive look, references to art history and the organiz-
ing of individual works into series, gave their work a
more classical appearance. They not only developed
a striking visual language, but created their own
conceptual world. Their fundamental ideas, which
they codified in various manifestoes, have remained
consistent over the decades. Gilbert and George
never stopped making fun of the elitist nature of
art. Their purpose was to break social and ethical
taboos and dissolve the boundary between the pri-
vate and the public sphere. In doing so, they proved
not to be shy of tackling controversial topics such
as alcoholism, sex, unemployment, violence, racial
tension, homosexuality, and AIDS. Religion, social
class difference, and other sacred cows were never
safe from the artists.
Between 1970 and 1974 Gilbert and George made
a series of charcoal-on-paper sculptures: charcoal
drawings featuring natural motifs that covered
entire walls. In a 1971 series of triptychs,The Paint-
ings (with Us in the Nature), Gilbert and George
put themselves in the midst of an idyllic natural
setting. Their photographs of the time were very
different. As seen in Gin andTonic (1973) they
presented individually framed photos in large pat-
terns. Until 1974 they almost exclusively made
black-and-white photographs. Not surprisingly,
given their increasingly transgressive subject mat-
ter, the first colors to appear in their pictures were
strong reds and yellows evocative of blood and
urine. Beginning in the 1980s and throughout the
1990s Gilbert and George produced numerous
series of exuberant, large-scale montages of photo-
graphs. These works are characterized by extremelyGILBERT & GEORGE