Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore have been working together for 60 years, making absurdist performance art and image-based works based on the idea that the artists are "living sculptures" and that everything they do is art. The first show at the Gilbert & George Centre, called "The Paradisical Pictures," has opened to the public on April 1. It is a collection of strange, large-scale mixed-media works that look like stained glass and have religious and natural themes as well as self-portraits. Prousch told before the launch, "New museums don't have the space they used to, so they can't show as much." We started with the idea that we wanted to be seen, and the only way to be seen is to build your own little museum. They have too many other artists on their schedules."
In an interview with the Financial Times in 2021, the artists said, "All the museums are now awake." Prousch added that the Tate has 23 of their works that "they never show." He also said, "Right now, it's all Black art, all women's art, and all this and that art. Just go to the Tate Modern and look around. I'm sure they don't have any Francis Bacons on display." Their comments came up again last year, and critics said that they go against their "art for all" philosophy. Some people didn't hold back. In October 2022, Nigerian artist and professor Chika Okeke-Agulu wrote on Instagram, "These two white British men are getting their own museum because black people and women have taken over the white man's art institutions." The artists said that their conservative political views make them stand out. "In Britain, it was a bad thing to say you were a conservative for a very long time. It was like you were weird or something," Passmore told. "We always vote for the Conservatives because we like to support the party that wins... We think the Conservative side is more normal, while the other side is more strange, radical, communist, atheist, or something else. Conservative means average or normal.
But Prousch and Passmore's works have been shocking for a long time. They have made photograms of urine streams, feces, and Catholic symbols, and in the 1994 self-portrait "Bum Holes," they show themselves without clothes and bent over, which is unusual. In one of their first works together, from 1969, "George the CUNT" and "Gilbert the SHIT" were cut out of their suits and worn by the two young artists.
When asked if they thought they were "weird," the artists said, "Absolutely not. We're normal—weird, but normal. We don't want to be weird because, in the past, all artists were weird, wearing sandals and smoking pipes and other strange things. And we don't want to be normal, because who wants to be the same as everyone else? But we think it's good to be weird and normal at the same time.
Jean Dubreil