GILBERT & GEORGE — The Paradisical Pictures / The Corpsing Pictures, Gilbert & George Centre / White Cube, London, 2023

Issued in spring 2023 for the simultaneous opening of the Gilbert & George Centre and White Cube's presentation of The Corpsing Pictures. Folded exhibition invitation, 22 × 17.5 cm folded; full-colour offset printing throughout on coated card stock.

This invitation catches Gilbert & George at an unusually exact moment: opening their own permanent Centre in Spitalfields while simultaneously circulating new work through White Cube in London and West Palm Beach. On 1 April 2023, the Gilbert & George Centre opened at 5A Heneage Street, a few minutes from the Fournier Street home and studio from which their work had been produced for more than half a century. Its inaugural exhibition, THE PARADISICAL PICTURES, presented the 2019 series in London for the first time. Three days earlier, White Cube had opened THE CORPSING PICTURES at Mason's Yard, 29 March–20 May 2023. A second presentation followed at White Cube West Palm Beach, 12 April–6 May 2023.

The invitation does not simply announce these events. It places them inside the same object. One panel gives us BED-WETTING, 2019: leaves, eyes, saturated greens, violets and yellows. Paradise becomes dense, artificial, slightly menacing. Another gives us BONE, 2022: Gilbert & George in bright red suits, tied together with yellow rope, compressed around an enormous bone. Corpsing carries its theatrical double meaning — the corpse, but also the moment a performer breaks character. Gilbert & George do neither.

Since becoming Living Sculptures at the end of the 1960s, their bodies have functioned as subject, image, signature and medium. In these later works the bodies are older, but still performing: bound, doubled, watched, buried in foliage, placed beside death and sent back into circulation. Then the invitation opens again. Gilbert & George stand formally outside the ornate green gates of their new Centre. That image changes the object. For decades they had collapsed the distinction between artist and artwork. In 2023 another conversion takes place: artist → artwork → archive → building → institution.

The Centre gives their practice a permanent address. THE CORPSING PICTURES sends it back into the commercial gallery system. And printed across the invitation is the line: “Gilbert & George and Jay Jopling invite you.” Artist-run institution and commercial representation are not positioned as opposites here. They operate simultaneously — Spitalfields, St James’s, West Palm Beach.

Its folds do not merely organise information; they separate and reconnect the structures through which Gilbert & George were operating in 2023. Paradise on one panel. Mortality on another. The artists at the gates. The dealer inside. A small piece of printed matter containing an entire apparatus.

Condition: very good; light handling consistent with its original function as exhibition ephemera. Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.