Gilbert & George NAKED BEAUTY, 1982

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. 

NAKED BEAUTY (1982) forms part of the MODERN FAITH series, which centred on urban living and the hopes and fears associated with contemporary society. The 1980s marked a stylistic departure in their pictures, which became bigger, brighter and bolder as they introduced vivid primary colours into their previously monochrome works. NAKED BEAUTY was exhibited in 1983 at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, and in their first US retrospective the following year, which toured to venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Baltimore Museum of Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York. While most of art history has concerned the idealised nude, here, Gilbert & George are unashamedly naked, exposed in all their humanity.