Gilbert & George Interview with the artists

By Rich Pelley

‘Hello girls,” greets 82-year-old Gilbert Prousch, one half of art duo Gilbert & George, as he shakes my hand when I arrive at his house with a very important guest in tow. He kisses his other guest on the cheek. Gilbert is Italian after all.

“This way,” he says, ushering us into the four-storey, 18th-century Georgian townhouse in Fournier Street, Spitalfields, east London, where he and the other half of his duo, George Passmore, 84, have lived since the late 1960s. Back then, they rented the ground floor for £16 a month. Now, they own the whole house. I bet it costs a bit more now.

I sneak a peek through a door at one of many living rooms crowded with antiques. As I walk further into the house, something feels odd. I realise that there’s no kitchen. Then I remember: Gilbert & George famously have no kitchen. They have long regarded cooking as time wasted when they could be making art – they balk at the idea that the “average housewife spends 27 years in the kitchen”, as they put it – and so eat out or have food brought in every day (more on their favourite haunts later).

We cross the courtyard into an impossibly warm studio to find George, dressed in a brown Irish tweed suit to complement Prousch’s green. The pair switched from Scottish to Irish tweed in 2014 to mark their disapproval of the Scottish independence referendum. Together in their colourful suits, they are unmistakably the Gilbert & George I’ve come to recognise:part artist duo, part double act known for being deadpan, mischievous and defiantly unchanged. The contrast is the point: here are two polite gentlemen in beautiful tailoring, whose art has for decades revelled in sex, bodily fluids, swear words, religion, death, urban grime and (ahem) schoolboy smut.