Gilbert & George
Gilbert & George (b. 1943 & 1942, Italy & England) have been collaborating since they met in 1967 at the St. Martin’s School in London. As students they adopted the form of “living sculptures” by walking through the streets and parks of London covered from head to toe in metallic make-up. Later, they moved their performances to indoor exhibition spaces and began touring internationally. From the outset, Gilbert & George wanted to collapse the distance between art and the artist. Since Living Sculptures, they have worked in a variety of media including printed media, film, and photo pieces, which they also consider “sculpture” and in doing so, have transcended the modernist tenets of performance and process art as well as conceptualism.
Gilbert & George’s extensive exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery (2002); a 2007 retrospective at the Tate Modern, which traveled to the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2007), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2008), DeYoung Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco (2008), Milwaukee Art Museum (2008), and Brooklyn Museum of Art (2008); the Kroller-Muller Museum; The Netherlands (2010); and the Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland (2011), among others. In 2005, Gilbert & George represented Great Britain at the 51st Venice Biennale. The artists live and work in London, England.