The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris presents the first retrospective of Brion Gysin's work in a Parisian museum.
Born in Great Britain in 1916, Brion Gysin was a multifaceted artist—painter, poet, performer, photographer, and musician—often associated with the Beat Generation. Inventor of the Cut-up technique and the Dreamachine, his oeuvre unfolds at the intersection of painting and writing, mobilizing an ever-renewed range of plastic languages. Passionate about otherness and a wanderer of margins, Brion Gysin traveled the world and frequented alternative and underground movements. His journeys led him to mingle with diverse creative and intellectual circles, where he often resonated unexpectedly and enjoyed a quasi-magical aura. Nourished by these encounters, his ceaseless creative drive expressed itself through forms such as sound and visual poetry, experimental cinema, performance, novels, and music, not forgetting painting and photography. The exhibition traces the major stages of this extraordinary journey that traverses all the avant-gardes of the 20th century and shows, in counterpoint, works by artists close to him or inspired by him: William Burroughs, Françoise Janicot and Bernard Heidsieck, John Giorno, Keith Haring, Patti Smith, Ramuntcho Matta… It also testifies to the strong ties linking Brion Gysin to Paris, where he lived for a large part of his life. He stayed there in the 1930s when he was a student at the Sorbonne. Around the turn of the 1960s, he frequented surrealist circles at the famous Beat Hotel (9, rue Gît-le-Cœur, Paris 6ème). From the mid-1970s until his death in 1986, he settled in an apartment facing the Centre Pompidou. Shortly before his death, he made the City of Paris his universal legatee. The exhibition, comprising more than 140 works by the artist, is built on the Gysin collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, of unique richness worldwide, complemented by exceptional loans from public and private collections in France and abroad. The exhibition offers a path through the major stages of the creative journey of this unclassifiable artist. It opens with a selection of works illustrating his interest in dreams, surrealism, and the effects of drugs on the mind. The exhibition continues by showing the impact of the main locations of his travels around the world. It then addresses the different facets of his creative process: the Cut-up and permutations; drawing, writing, and calligraphy; the adventure of the Dreamachine; the various forms of play and performance; his incursions into the territories of magic and the truly bewitching effect he had on his contemporaries; finally, the use of photography as a sign of his relationship with reality and photomontage as a revealer of his presence in the world. The exhibition highlights all the dimensions and potentialities of the Cut-up, a technique Brion Gysin discovered in the autumn of 1959 at the Beat Hotel in Paris. This technique is a Dadaist revival consisting of cutting up a text and rearranging the pieces randomly. The exhibition also allows one to grasp the central place occupied, in the artist's work and imagination, by the Dreamachine, a rotating cylinder with slits and a bulb in its center. The rotation of the cylinder causes the light emitted by the bulb to pass through the slits at a particular frequency having the property of plunging the brain into a state of relaxation and providing visions to the user, when they look at the Dreamachine with their eyes closed, through their eyelids. Throughout the tour, emphasis is placed on the multimedia dimension of his artistic production and on the dialogue he constantly maintained with works by other artists, earlier or contemporary (Victor Hugo, Henri Michaux, René Laubiès, Mohamed Hamri…).
Price: From 0 to 17 euros.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Paris Musées / Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris