Gilbert & George collect sex workers’ cards for latest works

Gilbert & George artwork using a repeated image of a sex advert

This article titled “Gilbert & George collect sex workers’ cards for latest works” was written by Dalya Alberge, for The Guardian on Sunday 2nd January 2011 14.06 UTC

If fewer sex workers’ cards are appearing in London telephone booths, it may be because Gilbert & George have been collecting them.

Sex adverts are among hundreds of cards, fliers and postcards of tourist sights that the artists have been taking back to their studio to use in their latest works.

Among the calling cards is a photograph of a male torso with the text: “Was born a girl. Sex changed to male. ½ only still girl. Handsome Turkish 21 yr old”. The artists have arranged 13 repeated images of it, above, in what they say is a reference to a Victorian clergyman disgraced as a paedophile.

It is among new works that will be unveiled this month at the White Cube Gallery in London, before the exhibition tours museums around the world. Gilbert & George, the self-styled “living sculptures”, who have created provocative and explicit art with unflinching realism, are among Britain’s foremost artists. The couple met at St Martins school of art in the 1960s and found recognition as artists by standing on a table, their faces daubed with gold paint, performing Flanagan and Allen’s song Underneath the Arches about tramps sleeping rough.

Since their exhibition at Tate Modern in 2007, Gilbert & George say they have been drawn to their earlier postcard artworks.

Between 1972 and 1989, they produced hundreds using postcards from the Edwardian and first world war periods.Their arrangements of these postcards into patterns have been likened to portals looking into the age of colonial Britain. Now they are creating a portrait of modern Britain through hundreds of mass-produced postcards. The Union flag, the houses of parliament, the Tower of London and traditional telephone booths are among images they have reproduced.

The exhibition coincides with Prestel’s two-volume Complete Postcard Art of Gilbert & George, designed by the artists themselves. Almost 600 works will be seen for the first time in the publication. The critic Michael Bracewell writes in an introduction: “The artists reveal how that which appears tawdry, commercial, sentimental or base, no less than that which seems elevated, exquisite or enlightened, contributes to the pattern and voice of the modern world.”

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