David Gilbert
Slips
03.10.26 - 16.01.27
Flatland Projects is proud to present a major new commission this Autumn by Los Angeles based artist David Gilbert, marking the artist's first exhibition in the UK. The exhibition follows and connects with the release of the artist’s first monograph, Lilies published by Zolo Press in early 2026. At Flatland, Gilbert presents a body of photographs taken in his domestic studio. Cut paper which hangs, dangles, bends and slumps is the central material depicted in these photographs, and the images act as portals into the temporal sculptural sets constructed by Gilbert.
At the centre of Slips is a newly commissioned site-specific photographic installation, which utilises the monumental scale of Flatland’s gallery space. The installation is an expansive collage of cut photographs and paper, swaying in the breeze and shifting with the natural light of the gallery space through the changing coastal autumnal and winter skies in Bexhill on Sea. Gilbert contrasts this new installation with a series of small-scale framed photographs made over the last five years, which centralise paper as a fluid material, delicate and malleable. He cuts suns, castles, window frames and flowers out of paper which peel and curl off of the wall, appearing fluid and in motion. They are metaphorically queer. Each image arrests a fleeting choreography of material, colour, texture and form, holding it in a moment of exquisite suspension.
In Flickers (2025), an off-white paper cut-out of an English castle, punctuated by juvenile, hand-drawn windows, casts the shadow of its turret across white paper billowing against a wall. Here, and throughout Gilbert’s photographs, shadows lend these fragile paper architectures the momentary authority of something solid: the silhouette might belong to a castle or merely its cut-out likeness. This slippage between object and image, structure and representation, allows the shadow to perform a kind of visual untruth; giving weight and permanence to something we know to be soft, provisional and constructed. The romantic repetition of the castle’s form carries a transatlantic fantasy with it: searching for a sculptural Prince Charming, caught momentarily in the stark light of a British summer.
In Sussex and Kent, Flatland Projects’ local eco-system consists of a constellation of historic artist’s homes, studios and gardens. Here, domestic life has long been a radical artistic gesture in the queer history of the South East of England. From the painted rooms of Charleston, where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant dissolved the boundaries between intimacy and artistic production, to Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage at Dungeness, a queer sanctuary assembled from shingle, driftwood, flint and flowers against the violence of the nuclear landscape. This heritage contextualises the dialogue Gilbert proposes with his commission: utilising his home as a site of artistic practice as a jumping off point and combining it with the space of Flatland specifically. Artistically, culturally, politically, it’s a proposition for inhabiting one’s home — or an exhibition space.
Today, The heritage of the region’s historic homes can be seen as sites of resistance, desire and chosen kinship. Houses become studios, gardens become manifestos, and everyday objects accumulate as quiet monuments to lives lived outside of convention. These places resonate with a broader transatlantic history of queer artistic refuge, recalling the intimate worlds inhabited and documented by Paul Thek, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz in New York and Fire Island, where friendship, grief, desire and the fragile rituals of everyday life became enduring acts of art making and resistance. These are places where belonging is continually rehearsed rather than inherited; where domestic space is claimed as somewhere to gather, to love, to mourn and to imagine other ways of living together.
This commission has been generously supported by Arts Council England, The Bridget Riley Art Foundation, and Rother District Council. Curatorial research has been supported by Fluxus Art Projects, and integral support has come from the David Gilbert supporters circle: Elizabeth Rickard Shah, Marla and Jeffrey Michaels and Chris Sharp Gallery, LA.
Press Release