Who are Gilbert & George

After Damien Hirst, Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, Supreme chooses Gilbert & George for the first collaboration of the Artist Series SS19 that will arrive in the stores of the brand and online on March 21st. The decision to pay homage to an Italian-British couple is interpreted by many as another indication of the imminent opening of a Supreme store in Italy. True or not, the 27-piece series of the irreverent duo 1984 Pictures with its vibrantly colored graphics comes out on hooded sweatshirts, t-shirts, long-sleeved shirts and skateboards, bringing the large grid-shaped photomontages that make up some of their more works memorable and controversial on topics such as class, corruption, sex and death at the center of the capsule collection.

Once again Supreme pays homage to its unmistakable street style as a talented, controversial and iconic artist. Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore meet at St. Martin's School of Art in 1967 and since then they always work together, giving life to the artistic duo Gilbert & George. About that period they remember:

"We understood that we were different from the others, because most art students belong to the middle class and don't have too many worries; they can always call dad or go and run the family business or things like that. We instead, who were country simpletons, did not have this possibility. We knew that if we had not become artists it would have been our end. We had to be successful."

This partnership results in a provocative work, dedicated to debunking cultural or religious taboos, highlighting the contradictions and prejudices of contemporary society. Their work is strongly inspired by the Art For All principle, according to which artistic representation must not exclude any aspect of the human condition and must necessarily have an educational function. As confirmed in an interview with The Telegraph:

"The whole world is an art gallery. We said we wanted the whole world to become an art gallery in 1969. And it happened."

And that's why the capsule with Supreme (the duo made one with JW Anderson for the SS19) fits perfectly into their artistic conception. The two, rigorously dressed in the same way (almost always a three-button tailored suit, made as they confessed, by a friend near Brick Lane and not Savile Row), are often the subjects of their works so as to have defined themselves as "living sculptures":

"Being living sculptures is our lifeblood, our destiny, our adventure, our disaster, our life and our light ... 'The centre of our art is a human being. We have a moral dimension: what is good and what is bad in people".

Although rooted in sculpture and performance, their work also includes photography, drawing, painting and cinema. Eclectic, but above all provocative. Their purpose is to make people think, even shocking. It has always been this way: ever since they appeared on stage with gold painted faces and hands in the 1960s and sang a popular English song, supporting the idea that artists should enter the field personally for what they produce, to the most introspective photographs Dusty Corners the bare and desolate interiors of the apartment on Fournier Street; from the multicolored panels of the 1980s to the reflection on illness and the loss of the dignity of the individual that touch the pinnacle of provocation with the representation of excrement in works such as Shitted and Naked shit pictures.

Tireless, for fifty years they have been targeting the bourgeois conventions of society, starting from what someone has called "a meticulous, archival, psychogeographical observation of the urban fabric of the East End of London", touching on themes such as religion and eroticism. It is no coincidence that the show that won him fame in 1977 was Dirty Words Pictures, 26 photographs of the couple alongside a series of phrases like "Cunt Scum" and "Are You Angry or Are You Boring?".

"We want our art to bring out the bigot from inside the liberal and conversely to bring out the liberal from inside the bigot".

They repeat often. And they continue to do it creation after creation. A perfect example is The Fuckosophy, a textual work composed of five thousand phrases, slogans and mottos, of all the variations of the word "fuck". Inspiration? A conversion of a group of masons at work in the neighboring house heard by Gilbert & George through the wall. Free to the point of verging on blasphemy, they are not afraid to liquidate those who try to combine their work with pop art by calling Andy Warhol a "commercialist" or Picasso a "foreign dago wanker". Gilbert & George are true to themselves, independent, firmly anti-establishment. Like Supreme.