Tate Modern shuns our work, artists claim
We were ‘woke’ before woke, say Gilbert and George in protest at focus on black and female work
TATE MODERN is too “woke” to show the work of Gilbert and George, the artistic duo have claimed, while suggesting that Francis Bacon’s work is also failing to find favour at the gallery.
Gilbert Prousch, 78, said such places were too focused on showing the work of black or female artists to exhibit their art.
“They have 23 (of our) pieces that they never show,” he said of Tate Modern. “All the museums now are woke.”
Asked why a woke establishment would exclude the work of pioneering gay artists, he said: “Because at the moment it’s all black art, all women art, all this art and that art.
“Just go and have a look at Tate Modern – I’m sure that they don’t have a Bacon up.”
George Passmore, 79, his partner of 54 years, said: “We were woke before woke.”
‘Just go and have a look at Tate Modern – I’m sure that they don’t have a Bacon up’
‘The individual today, how he walks through life. That became our subject and it was quite different’
In an interview with the Financial Times, the pair also took issue with Tate Britain’s decision to host to mainly British artists, which Gilbert branded “provincial” and which George compared to apartheid in South Africa.
The pair have previously said that they regard the Tate as “f----- for ever” because of former director Nicholas Serota’s decision to create Tate Modern and Tate Britain, “provincialising English art”.
The duo are setting up their own gallery, off Brick Lane in east London, so that they can show their work in perpetuity, a move they made because of their frustrations with the Tate.
“We feel many times that people cannot have anything, all these artworks that are too expensive for everybody except the rich, but normal people cannot have anything,” Gilbert said.
Acknowledging that they are represented by White Cube, described as purveyors of art to the rich, Italian-born Gilbert added: “We have to sell artworks to continue. We like, what do you call it, capitalism.”
George, from Devon, added: “We’re not anti-anything, like all the artists normally are.”
In 2017, the artists, who met at St Martin’s School of Art in London in 1967, said Tate never showed their work and never would “because nothing is good enough for them.” The Tate pointed out that, at the time, the 2007 Gilbert and George retrospective hosted by Tate Modern was the “largest exhibition ever to be mounted of their art”.
However, Gilbert insisted that it had only come about because they had campaigned for it and “twisted their arms”. “We were never invited. We are never invited to do anything.
“We always propose it, in Britain especially,” he said.
They have previously complained that Tate Modern has not shown a single artwork of theirs for a decade or more.
The pair, who are famed for their formal appearance, have lived together in east London since 1968 and often speak of their support for the Tories and Brexit.
They said that they knew even in their student days that they were different to their contemporaries.
“We realised as baby artists leaving St Martin’s that [fellow students] all did nice shapes and nice colours and nice angles; they never discussed life or hope or death or sex or beauty or unhappiness or dread or fear, never,” George said.
Gilbert added: “They all have formalism – forms – and we never had that, from the first day. We only have… the humanism of a person, the centre of our art is that.
“The individual today, how he walks through life. That became our subject and it was quite different.
“I still believe it’s quite different from many other artists.”