‘Gilbert and George — the Corpsing Pictures’
Lehman Maupin, 501 West 24th Street. 
June 22 to August 18, 2023

In the now-legendary 1972 video “Gordon’s Makes us Drunk,” the artist duo Gilbert and George can be seen immaculately suited and sitting at a table with a bottle of Gordon’s gin. 

To the strains of “Pomp & Circumstance” and Grieg’s “Pier Gynt Suite,” the pair become stupendously blotto, betraying themselves with slight sways and their increasingly slurred voices declaring “Gordon’s gets us very drunk” over and over. 

This is quintessential Gilbert & George. The fastidious bespoke suits, their invocation of the rituals of the British Etonian class, and their sadistic glee in subverting said rituals to obscene, grotesque, or comic effect. All of it done of course, with exquisite manners. 

Their ongoing “two as one” art world antics have been so inscrutably consistent over the decades that they have become an irrefutable, if not maddeningly strange, paradox at the center of the contemporary art world. 

They are a couple who declared themselves to be living pieces of sculpture in the late 1960’s and have continued in their “art as life” mission with nary a blink. 

Still living in their lovingly restored four-story house at #12 Fournier Street at Spitalfields, East London, the duo have lived for 55 years as a single, creative entity, during which they have churned out a vast body of images, drawings, video, installation and sculpture. 

Their twin suited figures and their serene saunter, mirrored step for step, has been gliding through their East End neighborhood for half a century. Since their arrival, the neighborhood has gentrified into a haven for contemporary artists, still largely populated by immigrants, but now counting Tracey Emin and Chris Offili in their midst. 

The “Corpsing pictures,” opening tonight at Lehman Maupin, arrive at a time when Gilbert and George have definitively moved from being outsiders to nearly being entombed in glory. The show is a cheeky and ironic look at the duo’s enduring legacy while contemplating their imminent mortality. 

The pair have appeared standing, suited or naked, in their bold panelled images throughout their careers. Their graphic style — true to their use of accepted societal forms to subversive ends — resemble nothing so much as the stained-glass windows of a church, with similarly punched up colors. 

The images that have populated these large-scale prints are taken from their voluminous photo archive, which contains everything from graffiti and portraits of local East London characters to pictures of feces, urine, and semen. 

In the “Corpsing pictures,” the gentlemen are suited and lying down, the palette dominated by scarlet and gold, and both are adorned with and lying upon beds of bones. The bottoms of their shoes are brightly gilded. In “Bone Ties” their usual dapper ties are replaced with bones, a nod to death’s triumph over vanity. 

In “Equals” they lie crossed under large femurs, contemplating their equality in death. “Ha Ha” finds them in a vortex of bones, feigning expressions of shock and dismay. “Paillase” has them feigning sleep and lying on pallets of long bones. 

In their long career as outsiders thumbing their nose at the parochialisms of the art world, it’s a delicious irony that Gilbert and George have become establishment relics themselves, saints of the contemporary art world worthy of reliquary. They appear to be relishing it. 

This current show also complements another show at London, “The Paradisical Pictures,” that inaugurates the opening of their own private museum, the Gilbert and George Centeer at 5a Haenage Street. 

In that current show, the couple are seen amid dates, flowers and dandelions in an exploding palette of fuchsia, ochre, cerulean and neon. It’s as if they have decided to bury themselves in one show, then frolic in the afterlife at another. 

“Corpsing” is also theatre slang for breaking character, often through laughter or inadvertent jibes between actors on the stage. Gilbert and George are nothing if not theatrical, their life as a creative unit has been remarked upon as one of the most bafflingly consistent exercises in performance ever witnessed. 

Both of them, of course, stone-facedly insist that what they are doing is not a performance at all. Could it be that the shadow of mortality — George is now in his eighth decade — is starting to crack their serene façade?

Not likely.