London’s Hayward Gallery Celebrates Gilbert & George

Last Updated on June 16, 2026

21st Century Pictures

Legions of fans of the artists Gilbert & George will be making their way to a new exhibition, Gilbert & George 21st Century Pictures, which has just opened at Hayward Gallery.

If anyone unfamiliar with the renowned Gilbert & George (they describe themselves as “two people but one artist”) were to meet them in the café where they have eaten their meals daily for the past decades, they would encounter two reserved and besuited men, living a quiet life in Spitalfields. They might not guess that, since meeting at Central Saint Martins College of Art in 1967, the two men became a unique phenomenon in the global art world. They present as ‘living sculptures’ and while they claim not to aim to provoke with their art, their subject matter has always provoked. Sexuality, bodily functions, race, politics, and religion have all been addressed with full-frontal honesty. They use themselves as their subject matter along with ideas they come across in the area surrounding their home in Fournier Street, between Commercial Street and Brick Lane in London’s East End. Gilbert & George are prolific producers of visual imagery – using photography, which is nowadays digitally enhanced – which they display in enormous frames, divided into grids. Their work is displayed in museums and collections around the world, and in London, they have their own gallery, The Gilbert & George Centre.

Now open at Hayward Gallery, Gilbert & George, 21^st Century Pictures, displays over 60 monumental works that represent the variety of their output over the past quarter century. It is fascinating to follow how much their work has evolved through the use of digital technology, with their works from the early noughties often taking the form of newspaper cuttings and headlines. These works challenge how the media shape our perception, and it feels as if they anticipated the clickbait headlines that are so much a part of our contemporary mediascape. As they have grown older, their work has continued to depict their neighbourhood and concerns about sexuality, religion, race and money along with ageing. They create themes of pictures, and the 2023 work The Corpsing Pictures reveals them in red suits and ties lying on and under bones.

The four works that constitute ‘A Quadripartite Picture’ are Sex, Money, Race, and Religion. These are monumental in scale. Three of the pictures have a background of vivid plant life, and the fourth has a jewel-like background. Despite the words having no other explanation, these four pictures touch on the fundamental fault lines in our culture. Gilbert & George announce the heading, and we are left to sit and contemplate just how meaningful and divisive these four words are in our contemporary world.

The 2014 series Utopian Pictures depicts aspects of British life, including the iconic Royal Mail post boxes and the red telephone boxes. There is always a message to be deciphered, although some are clearly anti-fascist. The artists declare that ‘we want our art to bring out the bigot from inside the liberal, and conversely to bring out the liberal from inside the bigot’.

Rest (2019) from The Paradisical Pictures is a striking work wherein they subvert the meaning of the title. Here, the artists recline uncomfortably on benches, their faces alternately pink and blue along with pink and blue suits. All around them, huge flowers are so brightly coloured that it seems like nature on steroids, the plants threatening to burst out of the confines of the frame. It is an exuberance of fecundity and colour that is simultaneously menacing and violent. Gilbert & George seem to be clinging to their benches for dear life rather than having a rest.

Bell Lane (2020) from New Normal Pictures depicts the artists as visual chroniclers who continue to scour their neighbourhood for material. Here, the artists are superimposed on a photograph of signs for a building site along with orange and white traffic cones. Alongside them are a pair of Greek figures holding laurel wreaths above the heads of the artists. This amusing view of the quotidian is multilayered and references both modern life as they find it, paired with antiquity.

The artists attended the press preview and spoke briefly about how much they enjoy exhibiting at the Hayward Gallery. When it was built in post-war London, many were appalled by its Brutalist architecture. Similarly, Gilbert & George set out to undermine and challenge conventions.

‘Our art is death, hope, life, fear, sex, money, race, religion, shitty, naked, human world,’ Gilbert & George have said. The 21^st Century Pictures challenges viewers to confront their own views and assumptions, feelings and thoughts about politics, identity, and all the big issues that we might otherwise choose to overlook.

Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures is on at Hayward Gallery until 11 January 2026

Hayward Gallery,
Southbank Centre,
Belvedere Road,
London SE1 8XX

Looking for something different? Check this exhibition from Mona Hatoum at the Barbican