The Hayward Gallery opens its Autumn season with a bang: Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures, a panoramic and sometimes immersive survey of the duo’s output from the last quarter-century. Now in their eighties, the duo remain resolute chroniclers of the world around them: acidic, eloquent, and still deeply confrontational, with more than sixty monumental works filling the gallery from floor to ceiling. This is one of the defining exhibitions of their careers.
The exhibition charts a restless two-decade trajectory, beginning with The New Horny Pictures (2001) and running through to The Corpsing Pictures (2022), before arriving at the unveiling of The Screw Pictures (2025). The new cycle carries the duo’s trademark provocation—its title a sardonic play on lust, loss, and the slow mechanics of decline. In these works, the surfaces are dense with scavenged fragments from their familiar East London streets: screws, nails, splinters, and scraps that echo both the resilience and rot of urban life. Rather than self-portraits, they read as dispatches from the borderlands between endurance and extinction—a record of two artists still testing what it means to exist, and to keep looking.
Since they emerged from St Martin’s School of Art in the late 1960s, Gilbert & George have refused to separate life from art. Their defining gesture—the idea of themselves as living sculptures—remains the axis around which everything else spins. Dressed in identical suits, polite to a fault, they cast themselves as witnesses to the moral theatre of modern Britain. Their pictures fuse the vernacular of the street with the intensity of stained glass: tabloid headlines, graffiti, advertising slogans, all refracted through grids of searing colour.
In the Hayward exhibition, this collision between sanctity and sleaze feels newly relevant. The London Pictures (2011) still sting with their headlines of violence and desperation, culled from the Evening Standard’s archive; The Beard Pictures (2016) now read as both wry and apocalyptic—icons of an era obsessed with identity, masculinity, and disguise. The accumulation of imagery across the decades—flags, slogans, semen, bones—feels like the archaeology of a civilisation still in progress, unsure of its own future.
Rachel Thomas, the exhibition’s curator, calls the show “a theatre of contradictions.” It’s an apt phrase. Each room at Hayward is a stage where Gilbert & George perform their vision of Britain—grotesque, comic, and disturbingly familiar. Their ongoing belief in Art for All is no hollow slogan: they dismantle hierarchies of taste by turning the everyday into myth. As always, their work asks for no permission, no prior knowledge—just a willingness to look.
Gilbert & George persist in pushing their vision outward, enlarging both the scale and ferocity of their work. Their use of digital tools has heightened the images into vast, hallucinatory grids—part stained glass, part delirium. Yet, beneath the technological aspic, the essence endures: two figures rooted in the debris of modern life, holding their ground and asking, with characteristic bluntness, what it still means to exist—here, now.
In the accompanying catalogue, Michael Bracewell describes them as “visionary artists in the lineage of William Blake,” which feels less like hyperbole than historical fact. Both Blake and Gilbert & George share an obsession with London’s contradictions: holiness and depravity, revelation and rot. The artists’ own centre in Spitalfields, opened in 2023, enshrines that continuity—a permanent temple to their philosophy of seeing.
Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures is not a requiem but a reaffirmation. In their words, “We love the 21st century. It is our best century so far.” The statement is both joke and prophecy—an anthem for survival in an age that threatens to consume its own image. At Hayward, amid the gridlines and the glare, Gilbert & George remain what they have always been: mirrors held up to the madness of modern life, and utterly, gloriously themselves. – PCR Words/Photos ©
Hayward Gallery, London | 7 October 2025 – 11 January 2026