Death Hope Life Fear

GREGOR MUIR I can’t quite believe that Death Hope Life Fear is now 41 years old.

GILBERT It’s extraordinary, half a lifetime.

GM What’s it like to see it on display again, here in the Gilbert & George Centre? What did you think when you first walked in?

GEORGE I thought: Where are they now, these lives? Are they still with us?

GM The work was made at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. One person who helped you, and sadly later died of the disease, was the poet and artist David Robilliard.

GILBERT David found all the models for us. He’d meet people in clubs and pubs like The Bell in King’s Cross and invite them over to the studio. He did quite an amazing job. We photographed each person for around two hours. We had this large lighting system rigged up and put them in the spotlight. It was very important that all these boys were not fashionable. They were just...

GEORGE Kids.

GILBERT Ordinary people – we preferred that. They didn’t even know who they were themselves, but that’s what we liked. We didn’t want fashionable. We wanted awkward in some funny way.

GEORGE At the end of every session, we always used to say, ‘I hope you’re not too exhausted’, and they always said, ‘No, I enjoyed it’. And we realised in that moment that they’d enjoyed the attention given to them, maybe for the first time in a while – or perhaps ever.

GM What does the title Death Hope Life Fear mean? Is there a message in the order of the words?

GEORGE We’ve always realised that we are carried along by degrees of hope and fear every day. We all live with hope and fear in different ways, and these are, of course, very fundamental concepts in life.

GILBERT ‘Death Hope Life Fear’ also sounds much better than ‘Hope Life Fear Death’, don’t you think?

GEORGE I think it’s more polite. You don’t want to leave death until last, do you?

GM The work is made up of 252 panels in total. The photographs were first printed in black and white, and then carefully dyed. Even 41 years on, it still has an incredible effect – the colours are so vivid.

GILBERT It looks like it was made yesterday. Not only that, but its meaning hasn’t aged at all. I think that’s also why it still has such an immediate impact.

GM How was it made? I’m assuming you assembled the panels in your house in Fournier Street, around the corner from the Centre?

GILBERT They were all made in Fournier Street. We had the design first – a 10 per cent scale drawing – so we knew how
we wanted it to look. Then we made the black and white prints, then coloured everything by hand.

GEORGE We had a certain gum we’d use to block out sections of the prints before we applied the colour. Then we’d remove the gum and colour other parts, and so on.

GILBERT We had to do the same for every panel. It’s amazing how we did it. It’s all to do with timing, applying the colours consistently at exactly the right moment.

GM You’re still living in Fournier Street and now you have your own museum, just a short walk away.

GEORGE It came about because we were stopped on the streets by people who said they loved our art but they didn’t know anything about it. We would say, ‘Well, what art?’ ‘Oh, I saw it in a magazine’, they’d say, or ‘I saw it in a catalogue’. They had never actually been in a room with it, and we thought that was an important difference – to actually be there, with it.

GILBERT I think we have been amazingly lucky to be able to realise our own vision, and to walk down the road and see works like this again.

^{Death Hope Life Fear was purchased in 1990 and is on loan to the Gilbert & George Centre, London until February 2026. An exhibition of artwork from the past 25 years, Gilbert & George: 21ST CENTURY PICTURES is at the Hayward Gallery, London, 7 October 2025 – 11 January 2026. Gilbert & George live and work in London. Gregor Muir is Head of Collection at Tate.}