• Exterior front of 1984 Alibis Centre Georges Pompidou exhibition invitation card, folded, showing a colour aerial photograph of a film studio backlot with a large rectangular billboard painted with a flat blue sky at centre, water tower at upper left, and surrounding low-rise industrial rooftops, printed to the right half of the folded card on semi-gloss stock.
  • Exterior of 1984 Alibis Centre Georges Pompidou exhibition invitation card unfolded, showing right-hand panel with colour aerial photograph of a film studio backlot: low-rise industrial buildings, a water tower at left, and a large rectangular billboard structure painted with a flat blue sky, dominating the centre of the composition; left panel white with Centre Georges Pompidou / Musée national d'art moderne logotype at lower left in small black sans-serif type.
  • Interior of 1984 Alibis Centre Georges Pompidou exhibition invitation card unfolded, showing right-hand panel with full-bleed blue cloud sky photograph and black sans-serif text reading: 'Jean Maheu / Président du Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou / Dominique Bozo / Directeur du Musée national d'art moderne / vous prient de bien vouloir assister à l'inauguration de l'exposition / Alibis' in large italic type, followed by artist list: Richard Artschwager, Gérard Collin-Thiébaut, Luciano Fa
  • Reverse of 1984 Alibis Centre Georges Pompidou exhibition invitation card, folded, showing plain white card stock with Centre Georges Pompidou / Musée national d'art moderne logotype and wordmark in small black sans-serif type at lower left, against white ground.
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The New Rare

Alibis — Exhibition Invitation Card, Centre Georges Pompidou / Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, 1984

Alibis — Exhibition Invitation Card, Centre Georges Pompidou / Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, 1984

£240.00 GBP
£240.00 GBP
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Exhibition invitation / fold-out card
Centre Georges Pompidou / Musée national d’art moderne, Paris
16 × 21 cm folded / 32 × 21 cm unfolded
Offset print on semi-gloss card stock
July–September 1984

Original folded invitation card for Alibis, the important 1984 group exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou featuring Richard Artschwager, Gérard Collin-Thiébaut, Luciano Fabro, Gérard Garouste, Pierre Klossowski, Robert Longo, Carlo-Maria Mariani, Cindy Sherman, Jan Vercruysse, Didier Vermeiren, and William Wegman.

The invitation was produced during the same period that Philippe Thomas and Information Fiction Publicité were beginning to test the instability between exhibition, authorship, advertising, and administrative display structures in France. While Thomas is not directly named in the exhibition, the object sits very close to that emerging landscape: institutional graphics, image circulation, and exhibition identity treated as transferable surfaces.

The exterior reproduces a film-studio backlot image dominated by an artificial sky façade — a fitting image for an exhibition titled Alibis. Inside, the invitation opens into a blue cloud field carrying the artist list and vernissage information. The graphic structure feels unusually cinematic and self-aware for an institutional invitation of the period, hovering somewhere between exhibition support, publicity device, and conceptual image-object.

Surviving examples are uncommon outside institutional archives and specialist ephemera collections, particularly in complete unfolded condition. Material from this early-1980s Pompidou moment — especially tied to post-conceptual and Pictures Generation-adjacent artists — has become increasingly difficult to locate as printed exhibition matter from the period is absorbed into archives and private collections.

Condition: Good vintage condition. Light surface wear, faint handling marks, minor age toning, and soft corner wear consistent with period exhibition ephemera. The marks remain part of the record: evidence of circulation, storage, handling, and transfer.

A printed support from an important moment of institutional transition: photography, simulation, staging, sculpture, fiction, and identity beginning to circulate through the museum as interchangeable formats.

Shipping and handling included.

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