Gilbert and George: 21st Century Pictures – Hayward Gallery, London (LAST CHANCE TO SEE)

Works by Gilbert and George from the last 25 years fill the Hayward Gallery in a riotous, colourful, cheeky yet unflinching look at modern life.

Gilbert and George

Here we go, it has begun. I promised you a slew of LAST CHANCE TO SEE posts as I scurry about the soon-to-close exhibitions of the London winter season, and here is the first one. The upside to the timing of my visit is that I have discovered THE perfect time to see an exhibition: late afternoon between Christmas and New Year. If only I could save all my gallery visits for Betwixtmas, and avoid the London crowds forever.

But we are not here to discuss my exhibition-visiting schedule. We’re here to talk about Gilbert and George: 21st Century Pictures, which is in its last two weeks at the Hayward Gallery. Let’s start, as we often do, with a quick introduction to the artists for those who are not familiar with their work.

Gilbert Prousch (or Proesch, b. 1943 in South Tyrol, Italy) and George Passmore (b. 1942 in Plymouth) met at St Martin’s School of Art in 1967, while studying sculpture. They have been together ever since. They first rose to prominence for their performance art: a clip of their famous performance The Singing Sculpture was included in what is still my favourite exhibition ever, David Bowie Is at the V&A. Although they moved from performance to formal art decades ago, their lives together have also been a kind of durational performance: they claim to see themselves sometimes as sculptors and sometimes as living sculptures. Gilbert and George married in 2008, and opened the Gilbert and George Centre close to their Spitalfields home in 2023.

As artists, Gilbert and George have focused almost entirely on the East End as inspiration for and subject of their work. They are known for large, bright, photographic collages, which started off being manually assembled but have moved to digital production. In these works, they include people and objects they have observed in their environs. Newspaper headlines are a frequently recurring motif, as are snippets of graffiti or flyers, natural objects like leaves or twigs, and always their own images. Gilbert and George espouse a strange combination of political and social views: anti-elitist, but Thatcher-loving. Pro-Brexit, but believing in art for all. It’s hard to know what are genuinely-held beliefs, and what is deliberate provocation.

21st Century Pictures

Gilbert and George: 21st Century Pictures at the Hayward Gallery surveys, quite naturally, the pair’s work from the last 25 years. This means exclusively large-format selections from The Pictures, their series of photographic collages which has been ongoing since the late 1960s. The early works in this oeuvre were black and white, then hand-painted with one or two bright colours. By the 1980s they had moved to larger, backlit works overlain with grids, and more colour.

The works on view here retain some of this analogue visual language, like the grids, while embracing digital technology. Gilbert and George play with the different elements in their compositions to achieve kaleidoscopic effects. Each image is multi-layered, with editing and scale further used to subvert expectations and disorient the viewer. Seen en masse, as they are to great effect in the Hayward Gallery’s large Brutalist spaces, the works are a riot of colour and different references.

What was nice about visiting at such a quiet time is that these are works that reward slow looking. Each image is made up of many composite parts. Some require quite a bit of reading. There’s the initial impression, followed by a close-up analysis of what all the different bits in the image are. Sometimes this took discussion with my exhibition buddy, while other times we walked away still unsure. Then there’s the thinking about what it means. Sure, this image is plastered with ads for sex workers. But what does that tell us? Or, in these ones about religion, it seems clear Gilbert and George include religious authorities in their anti-authoritarianism. How does that tally with their conservatism? Is there a tension there, or is there not?

Final Thoughts

If I have one critique of the exhibition, it’s the relative lack of explanatory texts. There are introductions to each room, but nothing that I could find on the works themselves. And, as you can tell by my questions above, I felt I needed that from time to time. I suspect that the lack of labels on individual works is a choice. And that it’s to do with Gilbert and George not wanting too much curatorial intervention, and preferring people to make up their own minds. Which is fine, from an ‘art for all’ point of view, which rejects a hierarchy of opinions. But let’s be honest, at £20 a pop it’s not a broad cross-section of society coming to the exhibition. It’s the same art lovers who go to everything. And like to do a bit of curatorial reading while they’re there.

Otherwise, I did enjoy the exhibition. The works are big and bold. They’re cheeky and funny. And I liked the self-aware progression of Gilbert and George throughout the works as increasingly old men. That they have continued to find new ideas for The Pictures for all these years is a testament to their creativity. And to their eye for an East London that has changed around them. Their level of engagement with and understanding of contemporary society as octogenarians is not to be sniffed at.

I must keep an eye out for what’s on at the Gilbert and George centre. I’d love to see some of their older work too. A bit of a compare and contrast, if you will. But I doubt you’ll see the 21st century pictures looking better than they do in the Hayward Gallery, so hurry along if you get the chance.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 4/5

Gilbert and George: 21st Century Pictures on until 11 January 2026