Gilbert and George - Early life, Performance artists, Photo-montages, Awards, Trivia

Avant-garde artists: Gilbert Proesch (1943– ) and George Passmore (1944– ), born in St. Martin in Thurn, Italy, and Plymouth, Devon, respectively. Gilbert studied at the Academy of Art in Munich, George at Dartington Hall and at the Oxford School of Art. They made their name in the late 1960s as performance artists (the ‘singing sculptures’), with faces and hands painted gold, holding their poses for hours at a time. More recently they have concentrated on photopieces, assembled from a number of separately framed photographs which key together to make a single whole.

Gilbert Prousch (born in South Tyrol, Italy, September 11, 1943) and George Passmore (born in England January 8, 1942), better known as Gilbert &

Early life

Gilbert was born in St. Martin in Thurn/Dolomites in South Tyrol/Italy, and studied art at the Wolkenstein School of Art and Hallein School of Art, Austria and the Akademie der Kunst, Munich before moving to England. George was born in Plymouth in the United Kingdom, and first studied art at the Dartington Hall College of Art and the Oxford School of Art.

The two first met on 25th September 1967 while studying sculpture at St Martins School of Art, now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, one of six colleges in the University of the Arts London, London.

Performance artists

They were initially known as performance artists.

A number of works from the early 1970s consisted of the two of them getting drunk, usually on gin. This work, in common with many others by Gilbert and George, is executed in a completely deadpan way. They refuse to disassociate their performances from their everyday lives, insisting that everything they do is art.

Photo-montages

The pair are perhaps best known for their large scale photo-montages, such as Cosmological Pictures (1993), frequently tinted in extremely bright colours, backlit, and overlaid with black grids so as to resemble stained glass windows. George themselves often feature in these works, along with flowers and youths, their friends, and echoes of Christian symbolism. The early works in this style were in black and white, with red and yellow touches in later series.

Some series of their pictures have attracted media attention through including potentially shocking imagery, including nudity, depictions of sexual acts, and bodily fluids, such as faeces, urine and semen. In 1986 Gilbert and George attracted criticism from left-wing commentators for a series of works seemingly glamorizing 'rough types' of London's East End such as skinheads, while a picture of an asian man bore the derogatory title "Paki".

Awards

They won the Turner Prize in 1986, and represented the UK at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

Trivia

Martin Clunes, while a struggling young actor in the early 1980s, was a photo model for Gilbert and George. The pair assumed ownership of a working man's cafe in Spitalfields near their house in the 1990s. George was briefly married to a young art student in 1967, until about 1972. The pair own one of the most powerful graphics workstation computers in the UK, needed to manipulate the huge file-sizes that producing their work requires. The two characters appear in pastiches of Gilbert and George's artwork, with the separate sections of the photo montages acting as individual comic book panels.