Gilbert & George

Gilbert Proesch was born in 1943 in the Dolomites region of Italy, and George Passmore was born in 1942 in Devon, England. Before meeting, Gilbert studied at art schools in Italy and Austria and at the Kunstakademie Munich, while George left conventional schooling at fifteen and studied at Dartington College of Arts and the Oxford School of Art.

The two met in 1967 as students of sculpture at Saint Martin's School of Art in London and have worked exclusively as the single entity Gilbert & George ever since. Their early practice centered on declaring their own lives and bodies as art, performing as "living sculptures" in suits, painted faces, and controlled gestures. They went on to develop large-scale, grid-format photographic "pictures," often sourced from their immediate surroundings in Fournier Street, East London, where they have lived and worked for decades.

Institutional recognition came steadily: the Regione Lazio Award in 1981, the Turner Prize in 1986, the Special International Award in Los Angeles in 1989, and selection to represent Great Britain at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. In 2007, Tate Modern staged Gilbert & George: Major Exhibition, the first full UK retrospective of their work in over twenty-five years, which then traveled to the Castello di Rivoli in Turin and the de Young Museum in San Francisco; that same year they also received the South Bank Award and the Lorenzo il Magnifico Award in Florence. In April 2023 they opened the Gilbert & George Centre in Spitalfields, London, as a permanent home for their art and archive, and as of 2025 to 2026 they are the subject of concurrent shows there and at the Hayward Gallery.

Gilbert & George's critical standing has been built largely through museum validation rather than a single defining review. The Turner Prize in 1986, representation of Great Britain at the 2005 Venice Biennale, and the 2007 Tate Modern survey, described by the museum as the first major UK retrospective of their work in more than twenty-five years, mark the core of that record. Their 2023 founding of the Gilbert & George Centre and the concurrent 2025 to 2026 exhibitions at the Centre and the Hayward Gallery point to continued institutional engagement with their work more than five decades into the collaboration. The recurring theme in institutional framing is their insistence that their entire lives, not just discrete objects, constitute the artwork, a claim reiterated across museum and gallery texts rather than contested by them.

Public information on Gilbert & George's auction market is notably less complete than the institutional record. The best-documented figure available is a reported auction high of approximately USD 1.99 million for a painting, cited by the market-data aggregator Artprice; the specific work, sale location, auction house, and exact date behind that figure are not disclosed in any source available for this profile. Major auction houses, including Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips, maintain active listings for the duo, though the individual results visible in those listings are generally in the mid-six-figure range or below, and none of the sources reviewed names a single lot matching or exceeding the Artprice figure.

There is no confirmed published catalogue raisonne for Gilbert & George; verification of works rests on gallery records at White Cube, Thaddaeus Ropac, Sprüth Magers, and Lehmann Maupin, and on the artists' own archive at the Gilbert & George Centre. Public auction data for the duo is comparatively sparse and incomplete, with even the reported all-time high missing basic sale details in the sources available, so collectors should treat any single reported price with caution and prioritize direct gallery or archive verification over aggregated market figures. Their deep museum presence, spanning Tate, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, SFMOMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago, is the stronger and better-documented signal of long-term standing.