Top 15 Gilbert & George Quotes

SM: You’ve always put yourselves in the center of your work and there’s a strong performance element in your practice. Has it changed throughout the years?

SM: Let’s start with a trivial question: why Gilbert and George and not George and Gilbert?

A clergyman once said to us, "Jealousy is a bad thing. But I must confess that I am sometimes jealous of the artist because the artist is closer to creation."

We don't want to know what we are doing. It's much better not to know. You have to express yourselves, once you've finished a group of works you have to start all over again. It's extraordinary stuff - what an artist has to do. You finish a big group of works, then the next day you have to begin again. Forty years we've been doing that.

But we don't want to think. It's exhausting enough without that. We didn't think when we did the Ginkgo Pictures, at all. Afterwards we found out all this stuff about them.

People used to refer to our art as "gay art"—though they never said the "gay art of Leonardo or Michelangelo." Much of our content used to be taboo and isn't considered that anymore, not just in the obvious ways of sexuality or bodies. The art world has moved to the point that Gilbert & George isn't on the radical edge anymore.

We want our Art to bring out the from inside the Liberal and conversely to bring out the Liberal from inside the Bigot.

We like to think that we’re forming our tomorrows, that we’re making pictures that don’t exist in reality, that maybe tomorrow will be a little bit more like our pictures than it would otherwise.

George: We say that how we are that day made us do that picture and we have to respect that. If you have another thought, that's another picture; it would be another one.

George: One man naked is a male study; more than one, well... that's quite serious - two men naked are more naked than one.

It is important to us to publish our art in books and catalogues, so as many people as possible are able to see it, but we also want them to see the real pieces. We like it very much when the pictures take over. When they’re bigger than the viewer. You go to a museum to look at a picture, but we like it when the picture looks at you.

If you are submerged in normal life, then your view will be normal. So we have to keep separate from normal life in order to be able to say something that is not known. People come to art for something that they don’t understand, that’s not in their life already.

Really creative thinking does not occur with regard to problems.

To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought.

We think of our art as just pictures, not as photographs. We are using photography, not being photographers.