The Gilbert & George Centre will present ‘DEATH HOPE LIFE FEAR…’ an exhibition of 18 pictures by Gilbert & George that span the years 1984 to 1998, an astonishingly prolific period for the artists. The exhibition brings together the epic quadripartite picture DEATH HOPE LIFE FEAR, which the exhibition takes its title from, and presents it alongside a unique selection of pictures from Gilbert & George’s ‘NEW DEMOCRATIC PICTURES’ and ‘RUDIMENTARY PICTURES’.
DEATH HOPE LIFE FEAR, part of Tate’s permanent collection, is one of 23 works created by Gilbert & George for ‘THE 1984 PICTURES’. The principal of this series is concise: youth, nature, Gilbert & George and colour itself. In the ‘NEW DEMOCRATIC PICTURES’, originally exhibited in London in 1992, the artists appeared naked for the first time. The pictures also developed the symbolic use of colour that had become characteristic of their work from the early 1980s onwards. In ‘THE RUDIMENTARY PICTURES’ the artists are stripped of the uniform of their clothing – appearing as vulnerable travellers bearing witness to scenes beyond their control.
From their very beginnings, Gilbert & George have sought to express in their art the fundamentals of human existence: the universal truths as they see them of the modern condition. The title of this exhibition, ‘DEATH HOPE LIFE FEAR…’ is therefore descriptive of the subjects surveyed by the art of Gilbert & George, and the feelings that may be evoked by those subjects within the individual, who as such ‘completes’ the picture, each in their own way.
“Each picture speaks of a ‘Particular View’ which the viewer may consider in the light of his own life.”
— Gilbert & George
DEATH HOPE LIFE FEAR stands in contrast to the pictures made during the mid-late 1970s. The artists are no longer the melancholy and profoundly emotional witnesses of modern urban life and loneliness but have become imposingly astral versions of themselves, at once vulnerable, imperious and seer-like. Their role as ‘observers’ of the modern world appears to have been exchanged for that of psychic explorers and cosmic sentinels, not necessarily in charge of either their destination or their destiny.
As taken to epic proportions by DEATH HOPE LIFE FEAR, these precursing pictures sustain and augment their brutal assault, pictorially and thematically, with the further deployment of bright primary colours – red, blue, yellow – that simultaneously appear industrial and synthetic. They resemble the flat, high-intensity colours of car paints, manufacturing and street signage. They are resolutely modern in tone, pictorially offset by chemically toxic-looking pinks, green and orange.
“We use colour in different ways. At first, we used red and then we used red and yellow. Now we use more colours, but in each picture, they mean something different. It depends on how we put them to work. They can be symbolic, or they can be atmospheric or emotional. You can say red is like love, or it is like blood, or danger, or fire. It’s used in different ways, not in a simplistic way. It’s more a part of own language, really – part of our vocabulary.”
— Gilbert & George
As the viewer sees in HEADACHE and TEETHING (both 1991), the ‘NEW DEMOCRATIC PICTURES’ extend the intense use of colour that Gilbert & George inaugurated with ‘THE 1981 PICTURES’ to its most concentrated form. In CITYDROP (1991), the artists are depicted as falling, floundering, crying out, and quite literally ‘dropped’.
The vertiginous dream-like scenes in the ‘NEW DEMOCRATIC PICTURES’ are succeeded in this exhibition by pictures from ‘THE RUDIMENTARY PICTURES’ in which explicitly interior journeys map both the grey historical vastness of the city, and the strange landscapes – like some manner of geological calligraphy – revealed in massively enlarged images of bodily fluids, painstakingly created by the artists.
Gilbert & George have long been concerned with ‘the moral dimension’ of modern society; they see this as the imprint of time and human experience on both the world that surrounds us and our feelings within that. ‘DEATH HOPE LIFE FEAR…’ lays this bare in a rare opportunity for visitors to view works from the 1980s and 90s. The exhibition will remain on view until February 2026 and will complement ‘Gilbert & George: 21ST CENTURY PICTURES’ at London’s Hayward Gallery, which will open in October 2025.
Learn more on the Gilbert and George Centre website.