Received the Regione Lazio Award in 1981 (Turin)
Received the Turner Prize in 1986
Received the Special International Award in 1989 (Los Angeles)
Won the South Bank Award, the Lorenzo il Magnifico Award (Florence) in 2007
Represented the UK at the Venice Biennale in 2005
The largest exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2007 Retrospective Exhibition
In December 2008, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by London City University. Gilbert's native language is Latin rather than Italian. He studied at the Wolkenstein Art School and the Hallein Art School in Austria and the Munich Academy of Art before moving to England.
George grew up in a single-parent family and lived with his mother in poor living conditions. He attended Dartington Hall Art School and Oxford Art School, then part of Oxford Technical College and now Oxford Brookes University.
The two met for the first time on September 25, 1967, when they were both at Saint Martins College of Art in London (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, one of the six colleges of the University of the Arts London) ) to study sculpture.
By 1969, they began to collectively oppose the sculptural methods that were prevalent at St. Martin's College because they believed that such methods were elitist and difficult to communicate with outside the art world. Their strategy is to turn themselves into sculptures, sacrificing their personal identities for art and inspiring creative thinking. Although their work encompassed a variety of media, Gilbert and George still referred to all of their work as sculpture.
When the two were still students (1969), they jointly created the original work "The Singing Sculpture", which was first exhibited by Nigel in 1970. · Exhibited at Greenwood Gallery. For the show, they covered their heads and hands with metalized powders of multiple colors, stood on a table, and danced to Flanagan and Allen's "Underneath the Arches," sometimes all at once. Do it for a day. The suit they wear becomes a kind of uniform for them. They wear them on almost any public occasion. And the two of them always appeared in public together. They consider themselves to be "living sculptures". They refuse to separate their art from daily life and insist that everything they do is art.
Between 1970 and 1974, they also created charcoal drawings (called "charcoal drawings of paper sculptures") and oil paintings, highlighting their identity as "living sculptures."
In 1971, Gilbert and George created their first "photography", which has since become their main form of expression. They gradually shifted the focus of their creative themes away from their own life experiences and focused on the urban reality seen on the streets and the various structures and emotions that affect life, such as religion, class, royalty, sex, hope, nationality, Death, identity, politics, fear and more.
In 1980, the main themes that the artist focused on were religion and despair - the desolate and empty belief in life.
In 1986, Gilbert and George were criticized for a series of works that seemed to promote "rough types", such as "Skinheads", as well as a picture titled "Pakistani", which contained racial Discriminatory meaning. Some of their works have also attracted media attention due to the vast amount of potential content contained in their images. Such as the works "nudity", "depictions of sexual acts" and "bodily fluids".
In the early 1990s, through a series of exhibitions in Moscow (1990), Beijing and Shanghai (1993), they drew attention to their ideas of "art for life" and "art for all" . These exhibitions highlight their belief that art can still break down barriers.
"Naked Shit Pictures" in 1994 and "Sonofagod Pictures" in 2005 attracted widespread attention.
In 2007, a retrospective exhibition of Gilbert and George's works was held at Tate Modern, and the Tate Modern published an art book about them, "The Complete Pictures (1971)" -2005), which includes over a thousand examples of their work.
In 2009, Gilbert and George held an exhibition called "Jack Freak Pictures" at the White Cube Gallery in London. Gilbert and George were partners in life and art who created a world in which their entire existence was a work of art.
They incorporate themselves, their thoughts and their feelings into their art. Their images capture people's daily lives and contain a wide range of emotions and themes.
From rural idylls to gritty scenes of corrupt London, from imaginative vivid panoramas to trials of human catastrophe, from pornographic advertisements to religious edicts. His artistic purpose is "Art for all".
Their overall unity has been largely fixed, starting with the piece "Singing Sculpture" and ending with their perpetually matching attire. They are well-known figures in British art, although they have always existed as something of an outsider - never easily far from their long-time home on Fournier Street, east London, where they sit at the same time every day Eat at the same cafe. Gilbert and George proclaimed "art for all" and "art is life." As they explained in their unique rhetorical style, the subject of art "must be the human condition, which we regard as the highest ideal. Man is the most wonderful thing among all things, and at the same time the whole form of art (color and form ) only serves the purpose of the subject and has no importance in itself. We hate art for art’s sake – we are completely against this idea.”
[Note: Conversation with George and Irmeline Lebeer, Art Press]