Gilbert & George: The Paradisical Pictures

The inaugural exhibition at The Gilbert & George Centre is THE PARADISICAL PICTURES, exhibited in London for the first time. Gilbert & George take their place in this disquieting vision of a heavenly place in a manner resembling psychical reports or transmissions from a journey deep into an enchanted forest or overgrown park.

It is as though a psychedelic landscape, more given to poetic realism and Arthurian legend, had secretly envisioned science-fiction.
This particular paradise, inhabited or traversed by Gilbert & George, is a place where the very air is drugged. From
picture to picture the artist is subject to biomorphic alteration into vegetable states – a turn of events that would be
cartoon-like and absurd were it not so equally sinister. The dead yet watchful eyes of Gilbert & George stare sleeplessly
from grotesque detritus of fruits and flowers; from masks of dead leaves – details of spirit faces, as the artist themselves are seen first pursued by unseen wonders or horrors, then finally exhausted, worn out, in a sleep that seems to promise no rest.