G ilbert and George have always liked to dress their provocation in conservative clothes. Even as their works combined enchantment with filth, illuminating blossoms and turds and bodies with the aura of stained-glass windows, they themselves have maintained the mien of country solicitors: immaculate ties and tweed suits, a permanent air of deadpan gravity, a well-documented admiration for Margaret Thatcher.
The gates open into a court of Dickensian cobbles and London stock bricks. The horizontal cantilevered roof of a new pavilion on the left, in which you can watch introductory films about the artists, hints that something more modern is afoot.
You then find your way into a low-ceilinged reception space, oaky and ochre in the style of a tastefully restored Landmark Trust rural retreat. Only after that, when you get to the clean-lined exhibition spaces, with their tuned lighting and suppression of distracting detail, the better to display the gaudy and luminous artworks, do you encounter what might be called the shock of the new.
It has been a place of dissenters and reformers, of deprivation and lurid crime. Here, the East End becomes a cinematic version of itself. Gilbert and George, who moved into their handsome Spitalfields house in , were part of this wave. Often seen walking the streets with their measured tread, they have themselves become a local conjoined landmark, latter-day pearly kings, a Hawksmoor church with legs.
It includes a small old brewery building, the sort of opportunistic and noisome business that once flourished around here, and a nextdoor pub that was once frequented by two different men suspected of having been Jack the Ripper. It requires some tact and restraint from the architecture to negotiate these many layers, which Irsara provides.
