‘You learn how to be idiotic artists’: Gilbert & George on fame, rebellion and their mystery new collaborator

The Britart mavericks have now teamed up with an unlikely artist. Is their odd throuple an elaborate prank – or are the duo passing down their legacy? ‘Hello girls,” greets 82-year-old Gilbert Prousch, one half of art duo Gilbert & George, as he shakes my hand when I arrive at his house with a very important guest in tow. He kisses his other guest on the cheek. Gilbert is Italian after all. “This way,” he says, ushering us into the four-storey, 18th-century Georgian townhouse in Fournier Street, Spitalfields, east London, where he and the other half of his duo, George Passmore, 84, have lived since the late 1960s. Back then, they rented the ground floor for £16 a month. Now, they own the whole house. I bet it costs a bit more now. I sneak a peek through a door at one of many living rooms crowded with antiques. As I walk further into the house, something feels odd. I realise that there’s no kitchen. Then I remember: Gilbert & George famously have no kitchen. They have long regarded cooking as time wasted when they could be making art – they balk at the idea that the “average housewife spends 27 years in the kitchen”, as they put it – and so eat out or have food