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In the wake of the exceptional success of the exhibition dedicated to them by the Tate Gallery in London, Gilbert & George came to Florence to receive the International "Lorenzo il Magnifico" Lifetime Achievement Award during the awards ceremony of the VI Florence Biennale, in the presence of over eight hundred participating artists.

Joining them was Tim Marlow, Director of Exhibitions at the White Cube Gallery in London, founder of Tate Magazine and currently a contributor to Channel Five, for which he presents current exhibitions. The presence of the two British artists enlivened the entire event: they gave an entertaining interview on their lives and artistic careers conducted by Tim Marlow and presented a video-documentary made and commented by them setssi.

Gilbert was born in 1942 in San Martino in the Dolomites; a year later George was born in Devonshire. It was the St. Martin School of Art of London, where they both studied sculpture, that brought them together in 1967. Singing Sculpture, their first performance in front of the school's students, was in 1969. The two presented themselves as 'living sculptures', renouncing their surnames and identities "because we come from nothing and where we are going nobody knows", they say. 1971 was the year of their first solo exhibition, when they presented their first large black and white images at the Whitechapel in London, the Kunstverein in Düsseldorf and the Stedelijk in Amsterdam. Success came in 1972 when they were invited to the Documenta exhibition in Kassel and the Daily Mirror proclaimed them "the great, new phenomenon of the art world". In 1976 the first museum exhibition in the USA, at the Albrightknox in Buffalo.

In 1977 they stopped showing themselves as living sculptures and their large, grid-structured image collages with their ever-present portraits began to undergo changes: initially only in black and white, red was later added as a symbol of despair until they suddenly became colourful in 1980. In the same year they participated in the Venice Biennale. In 1986 they received the Turner Prize from the Tate in London. From 2003 they began to use digital technologies to experiment with different effects such as doubling the same half of the faces. In 2007 the Tate Modern in London hosted them for the largest retrospective ever devoted to living artists. A further celebration of their artistic career will be the awarding of the "Lorenzo il Magnifico" prize for lifetime achievement at the VI Edition of the Florence Biennale of Contemporary Art.

It is known about their private life that they live like most English people. You can find them in the phone book and meet them on the bus. Among the most represented themes: religion, sex, racial problems and personal identity. Their protagonist is the metropolis, and the tensions and desires that arise in the encounter/clash between different ethnic groups, values and customs. But what characterises their art is the concept of embedding in the artistic experience the whole of human life, every moment and every individual, including themselves. This is how "Art For All" was born, a concept developed in the urban context of London's East End where they have lived and worked for forty years and which remains their main source of inspiration. A concept that excludes nothing from artistic representation, not even the most disturbing things or those unnamed by excessive respectability. An art that does not exclude bodily fluids, blood or even faeces, examples of Body Art.

In the 1980s, they dedicated a number of paintings to blood molecules, entitled For Aids, and in 2007 at the Tate with Six Bomb Pictures they represented London under the terrorist attacks of June 2005. For Gilbert & George, art is nothing other than a reworking of life and must necessarily also have an educational function, showing the way to overcome any taboo, whether religious, cultural or social.