In 1989 Gilbert & George held an exhibition at the Anthony d’Offay gallery entitled For AIDS, donating all of the profits to the charity CRUSAID. ‘All our friends were dying and so we saw all this end of life in front of us, every single day, and I think that had a big effect on us’, they have said. Their pictures grew noticeably darker. The bright colours and playful compositions of the early 1980s gave way to mournful, red-steeped landscapes. In THE EDGE and FLOW, the sweating limbs of a diseased body become like mountains from which the artists survey this ruined world. Images of fruit and flowers now seem especially emblematic of transience and mortality, while the drops of blood that spatter pictures such as BLEEDING carry associations of infection and vulnerability.

The other side of the espresso bar features the COSMOLOGICAL PICTURES, created in 1989 and still showing the artists haunted by death, with images of graveyards in vibrant purple, red and blue. In DEATH OVER LIFE, a single dead leaf looms above a brightly-coloured garden, like a slowly spreading stain that threatens to obliterate it.