Since 1969, the year of their first appearance in public as a “living sculpture”, the two British artists Gilbert & George (1942 and 1943) have been attached to blurring the boundary between their art and their lives. In their own words, their artistic practice aims to universally represent the “content of humanity”.

Twenty-Eight Streets, from the series London E1 Pictures, comes under this encyclopedic enterprise, in the centre of which the artists always place themselves, in their immediate environment. The series London E1 Pictures, is thus interested in the residential district of the artists, in the east of the British capital: the road names are inventoried and organised according to arbitrary filing. Using digital means for the first time to compose their images, the artists have reduced the range of colours to black, white and red while at the same time keeping the organisation in a grid pattern inherited from their former works. The London E1 Pictures also offer representations more or less vivid and more or less recognisable of the artists themselves. In Twenty-Eight Streets, Gilbert & George are only visible in the shape of luminous, phantom-like silhouettes. In other respects, the presence of crabs in the four corners of the work can be noticed, as well as between the artists’ initials reproduced in each of the frames like a coat of arms. With these crabs, parasites transmissible through sexual contact, Gilbert & George reconnect with the provocative representations of their former works of art.