Gilbert & George review – a pulsating panorama of sex, viole...

The first picture in Gilbert & George’s retrospective of their art of this century is a portrait of them sitting in a cemetery amid floating drug baggies, their suits bright purple (George) and green (Gilbert) against the grey gravestones. It sums up a stillness, a sadness and a romantic passion that breathes in this show – but you won’t notice it straight away. Instead you’ll be carried along in a rush of cheeky provocations and ludicrous juxtapositions of word and image: a joyous embrace of modern life or even, pardon my French, a jouissance.

The pictures tower and expand in this perfect brutalist setting as if you’re walking through a city of art – a dirty, disreputable city. Ages (2001) is a yellow and red slab almost the scale of a cinema screen on which their blandly smiling faces are surrounded by male sex workers’ adverts: “27 YEARS OLD Latin, and very good looking,” “BLACK GUY 24 Marco. Sexy, horny and waiting,” “SKINHEAD JOE, 26. East End/10 mins Liverpool St. Administers firm service.”

Where are they now? Is skinhead Joe running a cafe or is he dead? You find yourself not sniggering but wondering about these young men. It’s a slice of life, a montage of transactions, moments, relations of power, desire and money in a metropolis. Gilbert & George are great scabrous chroniclers of London in the tradition of Hogarth. Like him, they dive into the dirty alleys of a city that can be brutal and they come up laughing at it all. One of their obsessions a few years ago was Evening Standard headline hoardings that tempted commuters with the latest horrors. One picture is an array containing the word “Murder”. So many murders. Other such pictures highlight bombings, and brothels – “VICAR FIGHTS BROTHEL CLOSURE” is a gem.

It’s hard to resist quoting Gilbert & George’s choice gobbets of found language. I won’t do it again, promise, except: “PEARLY PENILE PAPULES” and “LIFE AFTER DEATH PROVED.” The latter is at the centre of a picture that includes people snapped on a bus, Gilbert & George wearing terroristic balaclavas and a telephone box and postbox perhaps offering communication with the next life. It’s funny but serious, too – what if life after death was proven?

You might find it hard to look past the words Sex, Money, Race and Religion on Gilbert & George’s epic quadripartite picture entitled, what else, Sex, Money, Race and Religion. But if you do, another story is told. Postmarks from old letters or postcards, surely hoarded by the artists, are scattered across masses of brightly coloured leaves. The dates are meaningful. On Sex, they come from the 1960s and early 70s: “Aylesbury, Bucks, 1969”, “Cambridge, 1971.” Money takes us through the late 70s into the 1980s when they began to make their pictures, thus monetising as well as preserving their previously ephemeral art. Race preoccupied them in the 1980s while religion worried them in the 1990s: “Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, 26. 2. 1996”, says one of the last postmarks.

Religion still gets their goat. They are opposed to all authoritarianism, especially religious. Their insults to God have got ruder as religion in this century has grown as a sociopolitical force. Pixie Hill conflates Christ with a grotesque toy pixie, Was Jesus Heterosexual makes merry with crucifixes while other ginormous works are covered with graffiti against multifarious faiths. But you would have to try hard to be offended. The moment you see something that contradicts your personal politico-religious bubble, it’s contradicted. You might expect them to flaunt the union jack, and they do, but did you expect to see their Antifa inspired series that includes “Our grandparents didn’t vote for fascists … They shot them!”

They don’t mean to make a political point by the flag waving, or the fascist-killing – they just show what they see, and what they see is everything. All human existence is crystallised in their particular urban world, living and dying in their local streets. Yet the hardcore truth behind the hilarity is poetic. What stays with you is beauty. For they don’t just find rude objects and words on their walks. They collect leaves and twigs and photograph pockets of urban nature among the comic horrors. In Cross Kissing, a curly frond of city weed links their mouths. And the most recent work I noticed here, from 2024, portrays them with a twig they found. It’s called Twig. In a way, lust for life is their religion. What are all these vast multicoloured pictures if not stained glass windows? Gilbert and George worship in their own way – they reverence nature, the city, their relationship.

Another picture here, 28 London Streets, is a gallery of evocative street names from their neighbourhood – Princelet Street, Henriques Street, Chudleigh Street. Instead of gurning or cavorting as in their other self portraits, the artists here are two misty, spectral entities: the ghosts of Gilbert & George, haunting their old streets for ever. They made that back in 2003, at the start of their 60s. Now they are in their 80s. And they haunt the same streets, but not as ghosts. Not yet.

Some sophisticates may be a bit sick of their antics, but to rip off Dr Johnson on London itself – to be tired of Gilbert & George is to be tired of life.

• Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures is at the Hayward Gallery, London, 7 October to 11 January