ROSE WYLIE, Horse, Bird, Cat, David Zwirner, 2016

Exhibition invitation issued by David Zwirner for Rose Wylie's solo exhibition Horse, Bird, Cat, held at The Upper Room, 24 Grafton Street, London, 24 November 2016 through 7 January 2017. Offset-printed card, 20 × 20 cm. Image recto, exhibition and gallery information verso.

The exhibition was Wylie's first at David Zwirner and was staged in the Upper Room, a secondary gallery space occasionally used to present artists outside the gallery's core roster. At the time, Wylie remained represented by Union Gallery, London — whose name appears in the exhibition's own credit line alongside David Zwirner's. Not quite a year later, in November 2017, David Zwirner announced that Wylie had joined the gallery.

The recto reproduces a detail of Black Painting; Horse, Bird, Cat (2016), the eighteen-foot, three-part oil on canvas from which the exhibition took its title. Wylie worked the painting's black forms by hand rather than brush, revising passages by collaging fresh canvas over earlier marks. The work was acquired from Zwirner in 2017 and resurfaced at Christie's in February 2025.

The invitation survives from a precisely dateable interval: substantial institutional recognition — Tate Britain, the John Moores Painting Prize, the Charles Wollaston Award — had already arrived, but the gallery relationship that would define the next phase of her career had not yet been formalised. Union Gallery is still present; David Zwirner is already present. A small printed object produced while an artist's position was visibly shifting.

Condition: Very good. Light surface and handling wear consistent with distribution and storage; minor edge and corner softening and a few faint marks to the verso. Image side remains strong and clean. No writing or postal use visible.