Gilbert & George, exhibition review: the smart-suited artists are having a bad hair day

Gilbert & George may freshen up their imagery, but their essential language — their trademark “photo-pieces”, made from grids of framed digital prints forming a single image, with G&G as protagonists — has remained essentially the same for 40 of the 50 years they’ve lived and worked together. And it’s wearing thin.

The Beard Pictures are, as always, informed from their observations of the world around them in the East End. For G&G, beards are a symbol of the multiple faiths that surround them and a now ubiquitous adornment of young men — they’ve noted that “F*** off hipsters” graffiti is “written all along Brick Lane”.

The series finds them in outlandishly hirsute form. They’re always in acid red, sometimes with cartoonishly large heads, with beards stretching from their faces into various shapes — beer glasses in Beardtoast, a candelabra in Beardlight, the front door of their house in Fournier Street in Beardoor.

The beards are shaped from different types of leaves, from hay and decorative flowers, from the heads on coinage. But most often, they’re formed from barbed wire and security fencing. If not in the beards, they puncture G&G’s faces or bodies, or enclose the compositions.

The duo see beards as defensive, particularly in a religious context (a particular G&G bugbear), where they fence people off. George recently remarked that “you switch on the news and you see barbed wire and bearded people”. These dubious utterances find their expression in works like Beards of War, in which beards and background are formed from the rubble and mangled steel rods of destroyed buildings.

But as so often with G&G, there’s too much work here, and it’s repetitive and predictable. Oddly, given their aim to be aggressive and provocative, the overall effect is bland. And this is nowhere truer than their F***osophy, the procession of phrases with the f-word, listed in alternatively black and red capital letters along acres of the gallery wall. Some are from overheard conversations — F****** NIGHTMARE — while others insert the word into titles — THE F*** IN VICTORIAN ART.

It’s neither shocking nor amusing, and perhaps the word’s harmless ubiquity is the point. But this deluge of f-words prompted from me, as so much recent G&G work does, an indifferent shrug.

Until Jan 28, White Cube; whitecube.com