Ecstasy & Anxiety & Gilbert & George: 21ST CENTURY PICTURES at The Hayward Gallery

I remember vividly the first time I came across Gilbert and George, the now aging enfants terrible of the London art scene, whose work and carefully-constructed personae has become something of a shorthand for everything from sincere postmodernism to high-brow filth (the latter accusation being one they’d surely be utterly delighted by).

Yes, I remember it well: I was 16 years old and on a city college trip to the German city of Cologne, surrounded by art students and nursing a vicious hangover acquired by the previous few days being spent in Amsterdam, and worrying about going back to London with very little to say for myself. It was, it turns out, rather fitting. 

My discovery of these two strange men, by way of a series of ‘living sculpture’ films from the early 1980s, was something of a revelation. I watched, transfixed, while a film in a contemporary art gallery showed both Gilbert and George sitting like suburban English corpses in front of a camera, their pressed suits - which they’ve referred to on numerous occasions as their ‘armour’ - present and correct, as they have been in every artwork ever since. Every minute or so, they’d take a large sip from a glass. A plummy BBC voiceover would announce “Gordon’s makes us drunk.” Another minute would pass. “Gordon’s makes us very drunk”. Minutes more would pass, the two gentlemen becoming increasingly unwell-looking on screen. Another one, this time with a veritable ‘Camberwell Carrot’ hanging from Gilbert’s unmoving, un-emoting mouth, was even more queasy and yet somehow just as compulsive. 

Are you angry or are you boring?

It was at once hilarious, hypnotic, slightly disturbing and rather brilliant. I was hooked, and quickly consumed vast quantities of their work in galleries across Europe and their home in London - it was as if I’d stumbled upon some naughty secret, despite them being a monolith of postmodern art with major retrospectives at the Tate Modern and other temples of culture across the globe. Prints of works such as ‘Are You Angry or Are You Boring?’ hung in my student flat at Goldsmiths College. I’d hang around Spitalfields, trying to catch a glimpse of the duo as they headed to the same Turkish restaurant they’d supposedly eaten at every day for decades. I even owned a few signed limited edition prints, which have since been misplaced as the result of various house moves - an expensive and regrettable loss, if there ever was one. 

This year sees a new major retrospective for the pioneering East London artists. Gilbert & George: 21ST CENTURY PICTURES is hosted by the wonderful Hayward Gallery, and highlights the duo’s evolution since the turn of the millennium. It acts as a deep dive into Gilbert and George’s second art, if you will - one in which they embraced digital technology in order to explore how technology and society have shaped the world and an artistic reflection of its impact and underbelly. The result is stark, confronting, imposing and deeply impressive; this is Gilbert and George bigger, bolder and possibly more outrageous than ever. 

Ha Ha

21ST CENTURY PICTURES (I’m told the all-capitals title is important, and who am I to argue?) features more than 60 floor-to-ceiling installations. Their art has always worked most impressively at scale - it’s one of the things that first captivated me when I was originally diving into their exhibitions as a young man - and it includes brand new pictures alongside a host of previously-acclaimed works from the past 25 years. It’s a grubby, shiny, inherently contrary, technicolour and thrillingly perverse journey through turbulent modern times as Gilbert and George experience it, and it works as a baptism of fire for those unfamiliar with their work as much as it delights those, like me, who are long-time fans.

Visitors will be confronted with stained glass montages featuring road signs, newspaper headlines, picture postcards, snippets of gossip, typefaces and overhead conversations - it’s a melange that creates a vivid picture that delves deep into norms, values and taboos. Gilbert and George, as always, are ever-present through their work: somewhere between vacant observers and salacious ringmasters, pulling up the curtain on provocative scenes that tackle the bizarre while delivering messages on religion, class, sex and death. Fittingly for 2025, their subject matter touches upon themes of nationalism and corruption, and yet we never quite know where their essence of quintessential Englishness (itself a contradiction, as George himself is Italian) sits amidst all the madness. It’s beside the point: Gilbert and George don’t dictate, they present. 

Recent years have seen Gilbert and George move on from their ‘living sculpture’ personas, instead referring to themselves as ‘visual archaeologists’. It’s not just a pretentious way of talking about their own work - it’s a viable description of what they do best in the thick of London’s ever-changing social scene, art scene, gay scene and street scene, all of which they’ve been constant observers for more than five decades. 

Funky

Their visual archaeology, if we’re to adopt the term, involves a process of mudlarking and sifting through the chaotic archives of urbane existence. Gilbert and George sift through absolutely everything in their search for visual and poetic impact: overheard whispers of conversation are transmuted into raw material. Graffitied filth on toilet walls acts as an unfiltered call to arms, politics with its trousers down. By refusing to discard anything as evidence, they’re left with a bricolage that speaks of more than the sum of its parts - and it’s often as profound as it is genuinely rather funny. 

If the new pieces in the exhibition - taken from the 2025 cycle ‘The Screw Pictures’, and featuring a mess of nuts, bolts, screws and other pieces of everyday ephemera picked up around Spitalfields - are anything to go by, Gilbert and George haven’t lost their ability to amuse, shock and surprise in equal measure. Here’s to another 25 years, and deeper into post-post-postmodernism’s ecstasy and anxiety we merrily go.