The Hayward Gallery surveys 25 years of Gilbert & George’s confrontational pictures, from sex and religion to mortality and modern anxieties.
Gilbert & George: 21ST CENTURY PICTURES
7th October, 2025 – 4th January, 2026
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XX
Full price standard: £20
Concessions available & Southbank Centre Members go free
This autumn, the Hayward Gallery will open Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures, a major exhibition tracing a quarter century of work by the ever-provocative East London duo. Running from 7 October 2025 through 11 January 2026, the show brings together more than 60 of their signature floor-to-ceiling works, including new pieces shown for the first time.
SEX MONEY RACE RELIGION, 2016
Dimensions variable
© Gilbert & George. Courtesy of Gilbert & George,
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris and White Cube
For more than five decades, Gilbert & George have described themselves as “living sculptures,” blurring the line between life and art. Their latest exhibition underscores that commitment, presenting the artists as self-appointed chroniclers of modern life — “visual archaeologists,” as they put it — sifting through the flotsam of daily existence. Headlines, street signs, postcards and overheard fragments of conversation become raw material, transformed into images that wrestle with questions of sex, religion, class, nationalism, corruption and death.
Two new works from their 2025 cycle The Screw Pictures will debut at the Hayward. Composed of screws, nuts, bolts and other ordinary objects gathered near their home, the pieces signal an increasing preoccupation with age and mortality. The title, with its characteristic punning, nods both to the literal hardware and to the word’s more colloquial meanings.
The show will also revisit several of the artists’ most ambitious series of the past 25 years, including New Horny Pictures (2001), The London Pictures (2011), The Beard Pictures (2016) and Corpsing Pictures (2022). Since the turn of the millennium, the pair have expanded the scale and intensity of their work, employing digital manipulation to heighten colour and distortion in ways that reflect contemporary anxieties and desires.
HA-HA, 2022
Mixed media
74.8 x 88.98 x 1.5 inches
190 x 226 x 3.81 cm
© Gilbert & George. Courtesy the artists
and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Philharmonia Orchestra, one of the Southbank Centre’s resident ensembles, will present Gilbert & George: Sex, Money, Race, Religion, a concert inspired by the artists’ recurring themes. The performance takes place at the Hayward on 5 October 2025.
The exhibition is organised by Rachel Thomas, the Hayward’s Roden Chief Curator, with assistant curators Suzanna Petot and Hannah Martin and curatorial assistant Ananya Jain. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the show, featuring essays by Michael Bracewell and Ms. Thomas, as well as a new interview with the artists by Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures is supported by Lehmann Maupin, Thaddaeus Ropac and White Cube.
Gilbert & George: 21ST CENTURY PICTURES opens on the 7th of October, 2025 until the 4th of January, 2026 at Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre
©2025 Southbank Centre
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