‘Warhol cooked us scrambled eggs. Or was it Rauschenberg?’ – Gilbert and George preserve their greatest moments
George and Gilbert are showing me the Himalayan magnolia they’ve planted in the freshly cobbled courtyard of the Gilbert and George Centre. It’s a tall specimen that’s already starting to unleash its ravishing red blooms. “Just like human hearts!” they exclaim, adding that the friend who first showed them this tree’s flowers has just died. “It’s amazing,” says George, “that on the day we thought, ‘Let’s take a photograph to send him’, we should hear that he died.”
George Passmore is 81 and his husband Gilbert Prousch is nearly 80. The pair have been working as a piece of living art, a single artistic entity, since the 1960s and are intensely aware of how many people they’ve outlived. “They’ve all gone,” says George. “Duncan’s gone, Warhol’s gone.”
It’s not surprising that their friend, the artist Duncan Grant who painted them, is dead, as he was born in 1885. But Andy Warhol was a fellow spirit who encouraged their early work and came to
