“We believe very much that the artist has to ask questions. Why we are here? What we should do here? What we should improve? That’s the only way to change the world.”

Gilbert & George met in London in 1967 as students of sculpture at St Martin’s School of Art and decided to weld their lives and art together in an indivisible whole, working as a single artist. Over the following decades, they have investigated the fragility of the human condition and addressed controversial issues such as identity, sexuality, politics and religion. Recording the crude aggressiveness of the modern world and the proliferation of demands to which the individual is constantly subjected, Gilbert & George use themselves as vulnerable subjects and nearly always appear in their works. 

They established their identity as “living sculptures” in 1969 with The Singing Sculpture, standing on a table and moving and singing to Underneath the Arches, a song in which two tramps relate the joys of sleeping rough. This choice is indicative of their intention to identify with social outcasts and the reality of everyday life. 

“Art for All” has been their motto from the very outset. Intent on reaching a broad public, they expanded their art through the democratic use of a range of media, each of which being regarded as a form of sculpture. In the 1970s, after the Charcoal on Paper Sculptures, they began to use small black-andwhite photographs, initially arranged in pseudo-figurative patterns and then in precise grids. The 1980s saw an increase in scale with works consisting of several photo panels, the content of each being previously determined through a series of preparatory drawings. The artists compare the juxtaposition of panels to the layers of bricks needed to build a wall or the succession of the words needed to make a sentence. The introduction of colour began with red, chosen for its association with blood, violence and danger, and continued with yellow, green and blue, followed by the entire chromatic scale. 

Animated by a deep sense of psychological introspection, the art of Gilbert & George has its beginings in the historic house on Fournier Street where they have lived since 1968. Located in the East End of London, a multi-ethnic area characterised by the intermingling of different cultures and religions, their home is also their studio. Use of the written word, which always tautologically includes the title of the work, is another characteristic feature. Gilbert & George’s modus operandi includes appropriation of the rich variety of graffiti and texts, sometimes from unauthorised notices, found in the streets of their neighbourhood. Works produced halfway through the 2000s also used headlines displayed outside newspaper kiosks. Each piece of writing is photographed, rigorously classified on the basis of subject and type, and filed with all the documentation in a separate folder. This material can then be used, sometimes even years later, for the new works they devise. 

ROCKED (1992), the work in the Cerruti Collection, consists of four photographic panels arranged around the image of a rocky promontory stretching out diagonally as a vantage point for the standing figure of Gilbert. Seen from behind in a middle-class office worker’s suit, the artist appears to be scanning the surrounding landscape. Instead of opening onto a possible horizon, however, the world before him is a barren wasteland of an unnatural orange hue presenting nothing other than a multitude of stones drawn with black outlines and coloured pink or yellow. George’s face appears in the bottom left corner, portrayed as a further attestation of a solitude that, as the title suggests, seems to rock human beings to the point of turning them into stone and preventing them from having relations with other living beings. ROCKED is part of a contemporary group of works of identical format, many of which bear titles indicating different situations of immobility, discomfort or constraint.¹ In a statement included in the film Gilbert and George Daytripping, also produced in 1992, the artists assert their abiding interest in an art capable of addressing the great issues that have always faced humanity: “We believe very much that the artist has to ask questions. Why we are here? What we should do here? What we should improve? That’s the only way to change the world.”² 

ROCKED, bought by Francesco Federico Cerruti in 1993, is one of the works specially created for Gilbert & George. China Exhibition (1993), the epoch-making show of fifty-five works that presented their art for the first time in China, held first at the National Art Gallery in Beijing and then at the Art Museum in Shanghai.³ 

ROCKED was usually displayed in a reception room of the bookbinding firm in Via Ludovico Bellardi in Turin. Cerruti’s wine collection also includes six bottles of 1992 Barbera labeled “Gilbert & George. 1993 China. Peking Shanghai” (fig. 1). These are part of a commemorative edition produced by the artists. Unlike the teetotal collector, they have never disdained the comfort of a drink, starting with their beloved gin and tonic.

Marcella Beccaria

¹ Gilbert & George 2007, pp. 799-820. The work is published as part of the group of forty entitled The 1992 Pictures.

² Transcript of Gilbert & George’s statements in the short film Gilbert and George Daytripping, produced and directed in 1992 by Ian McDonald for Anglia Television, in Violette-Obrist 1997, p. 187.

³ See Beijing-Shanghai 1993.