The series comprises ten silkscreens on canvas hand-painted by the artist.
Jean Dupuy was a French artist, an experimenter in art and technology, and a bold affiliate of Fluxus. He began his career in Paris, training as an architect at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts but soon shifted to painting, approaching the visual research of abstrait lyrique. Sensitive to the French orientations of poetry and performance art of François Dufrêne, Brion Gysin, Bernard Heidsieck, and Robert Filliou, as well as to the expressive tonalities of Yves Klein and Georges Mathieu, Dupuy’s career as a painter was particularly successful but, in his own eyes, unsatisfactory. In 1967, he destroyed his canvases and left Paris to move to New York. The following year, Dupuy realized Cone Pyramid (Heart Beats Dust), a parallelepiped of wood and glass, inside which a small cluster of red pigment is deposited over an elastic membrane, illuminated by a cone of light. Using a stethoscope, the viewer’s heartbeat activates the column of red dust, causing it to convulse rhythmically in the air. In 1968, the sculpture won the Experiments in Art and Technology competition and was presented that same year as part of the landmark exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and simultaneously in the exhibition Some More Beginnings at the Brooklyn Museum. In the early 1970s, Dupuy began performing collectively with numerous New York-based artists. He organized performances at the Judson Memorial Church, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, and the Louvre. Events such as “Soup & Tart” at The Kitchen included contributions by Philip Glass, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Joan Jonas. In his Grommet Studio in New York, he hosted a series of performances and concerts, documented in the catalog Collective Consciousness: Art Performances in the Seventies (1980). On the occasion of a group exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1976, he met George Maciunas and became involved in Fluxus, participating in numerous related events. Dupuy returned to France in 1984, settling in the hinterland of Nice. His book Ypudu, Anagrammiste, published that same year, is his first collection of anagrams and word games. Between 1988 and 1991, Dupuy spent six months in Verona with Francesco Conz. Together, they produced a series of editions entirely dedicated to wordplay and phonograms. Dupuy’s works are included in some of the most prestigious institutional collections, such as those of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Musée d’art contemporain in Lyon. His works have been shown in exhibitions at the Fondazione Mudima in Milan (1990), the Frac Bretagne (2014), the Frac Bourgogne (2016), and the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain de Nice (2007, 2015, 2016).