Gilbert & George Bench Test, 2020

Gilbert & George have created art together since 1967 when they met at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London and decided that their art should be understood as emerging from a single source. Theirs would be, in their words, ‘art for all’, in contrast to what they saw as the overly cerebral and elitist Minimalist and Conceptual work that was dominant at the time. Their works are defined by their focus on the world we live in from the perspective of the windows of the artists’ home in the multi-layered, diverse culture of Spitalfields, London, as well as their attitudes to humanity, sex, religion, race, money and death. Created over the past two years, Gilbert & George’s NEW NORMAL PICTURES are a continuation of their street-level explorations of life in East London, featuring clashing tonal contrasts and distortions of scale and perspective. In BENCH TEST (2020) a park bench and the familiar figures of the artists themselves are rendered uncanny and, in their own words, ‘disturbing,’ forming a vision of our world that is subtly off-kilter and not-quite-normal.

The Gilbert & George Centre was opened in April 2023 as a permanent home for their artistic legacy, presenting one or two exhibitions a year and providing visitors with the widest possible access to their historical and new pictures, as well as a place for research and scholarship on their practice.