Gilbert & George are fixtures of Fournier Street in Spitalfields, East London where the artists have lived for most of their lives. Always neat as a pin and wearing matching, immaculate suits, the pair are often spotted walking together through their borough. Calling themselves ‘living sculptures’, they are virtually inseparable since they met on a course at Central St. Martins in the 1960s.
In New Normal Pictures, an exhibition of pictures made during the global pandemic, Gilbert & George appear in images from all over London, often looking dazed and comical, as if stunned by their surroundings. Their works are social commentary, an exploration of the changing city they call home, and they sift through the underbelly of London, through the trash and debris most passers-by overlook: plastic bags, drug paraphernalia, and graffiti.
Bagshot Court captures this seamy underside to London. The artists stand—or more precisely, slump—In front of a grilled shop entrance, the red vivid against the black and white photograph behind. A ‘please use other door’ sign is just visible, a symbol of mundane life, except for the supersized dime bags that float in front, decorated with smiley faces, a stencil of Bob Marley, guns, and the five-leaved marijuana plants. What has been contained in these bags is unclear, marijuana, perhaps, or something worse like cocaine, but whatever it is, its going to be illegal.
Gilbert & George are famously known for their right-of-center views, but they are also, they insist, interested in the democratizing power of art, not least in the slogan they’ve used for many years, Art For All. In a 2021 review of New Normal in The Guardian, art critic Jonathan Jones asked about stone plinths features in many of the works, which belonged to the Hawksmoor masterpiece Christ Church Spitalfields at the end of Fournier Street. Gilbert responded: “We realised for 45 years we were looking up in the air when we used to walk. Now we’re looking down towards the earth and we start to see a new world: humanity is looking down to earth.”
Gilbert & George are two of the UK’s most celebrated living artists. They are recipients of the Turner Prize in 1986 and represented the UK at the Venice Biennale of 2005. In 2007, their retrospective was held at Tate Modern, the largest of any retrospective held there, Their works are held in Tate Modern, London, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum of Modern Art among many others and there have been over 100 museum exhibitions of their work since 1971. In 2023, they opened the Gilbert & George Centre to exhibit and preserve their work.