Profiles

Gilbert and George are two of the world's leading contemporary artists and this Spring, a 40-year retrospective of their work is on show at Tate Modern.

The artists live in London, but George was born in Plymouth.

George Passmore would have been born in the city in 1942, but wartime bombings ensured that he was born at Flete House, which had become the city's maternity unit.

Evacuated from Plymouth, he grew up in Totnes. By the late 1950s, he was enrolled in evening classes at Dartington.

"I studied at the evening institute at first," said George. "And Ivor Weeks, the Head of Fine Art, spotted me and said, 'You should become an art student', which I hadn't thought of.

"That was the biggest break. The first big break."

Gilbert and George (left). Pic: Jo Loosemore

George then studied at Dartington College of Arts. This training took him to St Martins School of Art in London where he met Gilbert. Although studying sculpture, they both began to question and to subvert the formality of this art form.

"We wanted to move away from the idea of a big lump of stone or metal in the middle of a room and we had an amazing idea to make ourselves the art work."

This decision was to define the development of their art.

They adopted the identity of 'living sculptures'. This was most evident in 1969 with The Singing Sculpture in which they sang and danced the Flanagan and Allen song, Underneath the Arches.

The Singing Sculpture was exhibited all over the world and established Gilbert and George as contemporary artists who challenged the boundaries of performance and the visual arts.

Despite moving into other materials including photographs, paint and text, Gilbert and George continue to place themselves clearly in the images they create. As such, they are as well known as their work and for much of it, the art and the artists are inseparable.

Gilbert and George also place a striking importance on the role of the viewer of their art. They adopted the slogan 'Art for All' in their early work and have continued to articulate an ethos of an accessible contemporary art.

George explained: "We realised that formalistic art that was to do with shape and colour and form was a kind of elitism.

"That once it was taken out of the art context, it wouldn't be understood by the vast general public and we wanted more of an art for all. More full of content and meaning and thoughts. And feelings. An art for people in fact."

Sharp suits, seeing double, dirty words

The retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern shows a huge range of their work in more than 18 rooms.

England 1980 (see full details below)

It follows a chronological perspective from their early and more rural work in charcoal on paper, through the Bloody Life images of the early 1970s and the defining Dirty Words Pictures of the late 1970s, which placed their home of Spitalfields at the centre of their work.

By the 1980s, colour dominates the images and other people appear with the artists in the images created.

By the 1990s, Gilbert and George were continuing to develop strongly social themes - including responses to AIDS. The retrospective shows their artistic progression over 40 years. It also includes a new commission, The Six Bomb Pictures, which explores London's attitudes to terror.

Gilbert and George remain two of the world's leading contemporary artists. Their images continue to dominate their work and to inform our understanding of it.

As George says: "Art is not to congratulate people on how they are. It's to provide change, the opportunity for change."

The Gilbert and George exhibition is at Tate Modern until 7 May 2007.

Images:

Bombs 2006: Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube, London. Copyright the artists. 336 x 493cm

England 1980: Tate. Copyright the artists. Photographs, some hand coloured, framed. 3026 x 3026mm.