Italian artist Gilbert Proesch was BOTD in 1943. Born in San Martin de Tor in Tyrol, he studied art at the Sëlva School of Art in Val Gardena, before moving to Austria to attend the Hallein School of Art and later the Akademie der Kunst in Munich. In 1967, he moved to England to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London. He befriended fellow student George Passmore, who became his personal and professional partner. Branding themselves Gilbert & George, they began dressing identically in hand-made Savile Row suits and living together in a derelict house on Fournier Street in London’s East End. Their first public performance, The Singing Sculpture, involved wearing metallic make-up and moving robotically to the song Underneath the Arches. Their large-scale art installations, typically presented in grid formation, draw variously from newspaper headlines, street signs, depictions of sexual acts and bodily fluids, and street culture from London’s East End. In 1986, they won the Turner Prize, Britain’s leading contemporary art award, and represented Britain at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Embracing the idea of their lives as art, they usually appear in public together, identically dressed in bespoke tweed suits. Despite the sexual and subversive content of their work, the pair claim to be politically conservative, expressing support for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Britain leaving the European Union. Prousch has also been criticised for subsuming his Italian identity into an clichéd version of mid-century Englishness. They married in 2008, and continue to live in Fournier Street (now one of London’s most expensive streets), eating dinner at a local Turkish restaurant every night.