When Brit art world provocateurs Gilbert & George visited China
It was the early 1990s, the mainland was opening up, and coming in hot were the 2 biggest troublemakers in British art. The man who got them there tells all in his new book
What do you do when you’re the two best-known contemporary artists in Britain, you’re at the top of your game and you’re itching to conquer the international art world? That was the question facing the London-based duo Gilbert & George in 1993, and their answer at the time, however counter-intuitively, was China.
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The controversial pair had long divided British art critics as to whether they were national treasures or merely, as the London Evening Standard’s influential pundit Brian Sewell once declared, “art world poseurs”.
Graduates of the hallowed Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, Gilbert & George first appeared as performance artists and living sculptures, before moving on to large-scale photo works designed to shock, depicting racist skinheads, human faeces, nudity and sex acts, often with the duo in the frame themselves, looking on approvingly.
The confrontational style was not without precedent. Back in the 1950s and 60s, the School of London – operating mostly from a notoriously seedy Soho – was ruled by Francis Bacon’s violent brushwork, Lucian Freud’s explicit male nudes, and the layered, seemingly ad hoc work of Frank Auerbach. In the 80s, Gilbert & George attracted an updated version of that kind of attention. They were gay, living together in an 18th century house in the then-run-down Spitalfields area of East London, always seen smartly dressed in dark suits, sipping tea from china cups or downing G&Ts. They presented conservative, yet their work stunned and divided the art community, leaving as many offended as others were amazed. Works sold for vast sums, and it was hard to find anyone in British art or otherwise who wouldn’t recognise the dapper duo on the street.
Gilbert & George at the Gilbert & George Centre in London, in 2023. Photo: Getty Images
So having secured local star status, they decided to take some of their most notorious pieces on the road, presented on massive canvases and in stained glass, not to Paris or New York, but, inexplicably to those outside their circle, to Beijing and Shanghai.
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James Birch had trained at Christie’s Fine Art before opening his own gallery in 1983 on London’s King’s Road, specialising in surrealists and the emerging Young British Artists (the infamous YBAs), led by the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. It was, in fact, Birch’s eponymous gallery that gave a young – now Sir – Grayson Perry his first show, in 1984 (and his second, in 1985). Birch was also interested in Russia, and famously organised a late-career show for Bacon at Moscow’s Central House of Artists in 1988 (lean times for the Soviets, with one attendee writing in the visitors’ book, “We need bacon, not Francis Bacon”). Birch’s memoir of the experience, Bacon in Moscow (2022), is a rollicking tale of the avant garde, communist commissars and a Soviet cultural establishment divided between those terrified of bourgeois Western art and those eager to experience it, all during the dying days of the USSR.
