Gilbert and George

Gilbert and George began working together in 1967 when they met at St. Martin's school of art. Gilbert and George addressed taboos and social issues and always appeared as figures in their work.

This piece is made up of 30 photographic panels mounted in narrow black metal frames. Gilbert and George presented the majority of their work in this style. An example of a piece of work by this couple that shocked the public is a piece called 'Cunt Scum'...

'Cunt Scum' is just one in a series consisting of twenty six pieces of work called The dirty words pictures created by the couple in 1977. Each work in the Dirty words series are made up of images the artists took of each other, graffiti and east London street scenes. Gilbert and George  have explained this piece of work: "by putting the word along the top, then something vertical down both sides, it looked like a door. A door of hell. We found much of the graffiti in doorways ... We became interested to know what makes a person do this."

Our Project

In our group of six, we had to come up with ideas for a piece of artwork in the style of the one above. We first picked a topic to work with and i suggested music. My idea was to photograph stereotypical people to each genre e.g. rockers, punks. I asked around and found out that my uncle and his friends used to be punks an rockers, so i got him to email me some photos of them, which he did. I was still able to use these images in our final piece because they where taken in the 80's. Our final choice was the to do a collage of the 80's. This is our mock up of our idea for the final piece...
                                                            

As you can see, we had some trouble with the colours of the portraits. The original idea was to put all red on one side and all yellow on the other, but i suggested that we do it like this. There are just under 400 images of things from the 80's in the picture of maggie. After this mock up, we adjusted the colours and positions of the portraits, printed and framed it all. here is our final piece in the classroom studio...

After we framed it all up, our final piece was put up on the wall in the college.