EXHIBITION // JEAN DUBUFFET - L'HOURLOUPE ET SON SILLAGE // OPERA GALLERY // PARIS

© Opera Gallery - Jean Dubuffet - L'Hourloupe et son sillage

Jean Dubuffet - L'Hourloupe et son sillage (1962 - 1982)
from 16 Oct. to 12 Nov. 202

Opera Gallery
62 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré
75008 Paris

www.operagallery.com

July 2025 – Opera Gallery is pleased to present Jean Dubuffet, L’Hourloupe et son sillage (1962–1982), a major solo exhibition dedicated to Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) during this year’s Paris Art Week. Running from 16 October to 12 November 2025, the exhibition marks the 40th anniversary of Dubuffet’s passing and highlights the importance of L’Hourloupe and the series that grew out of it.

Featuring a curation of works created over a 20-year period, this exhibition largely celebrates his iconic and prolific L’Hourloupe series. Lasting for twelve years from 1962 to 1974, the series constitutes a pivotal milestone in Dubuffet’s œuvre that would go on to greatly influence his subsequent bodies of work. In addition to L’Hourloupe I and II, the exhibition brings together works from Coucou Bazar, Roman burlesque, Sites tricolores, Crayonnages, Récits, Conjectures, Parachiffres, Mondanités, Lieux abrégés, Théâtres de mémoire, Psycho-sites, and Sites aléatoires.

The L’Hourloupe series originated from ballpoint pen scribbles,a kind of automatic drawing that Dubuffet would produce during telephone conversations. These works are characterised by cellular forms composed of flat areas of red and blue, hatching, and empty white spaces outlined with a thick black line. This cycle, the longest in Dubuffet’s œuvre, stands in counterpoint to his earlier series: a radically different style that he established as a system illustrating his desire to deconstruct reality in order to reveal another one. As Dubuffet wrote on 7 May 1968, “totally abstracting oneself from the everyday natural world to nourish the gaze only with one’s own mental elaborations.”

This exhibition is a testament to the artist’s creative genius over two decades and explores the tension between construction and deconstruction of reality, figuration and abstraction, matter and language.

Among the exhibition’s highlights is Échec à l’être (1971), one of Dubuffet’s 175 large-scale “Practicables”,painted cutouts originally created for his iconic immersive performance Coucou Bazar. This hour-long show, first presented at the Guggenheim Museum in 1973, was conceived as a hybrid of painting, sculpture, and performance, bringing the L’Hourloupe series to life with costumed actors, dancers, and painted stage elements.

In 1982, Dubuffet began the Sites aléatoires series, which included Site au Défunt (1982). Returning to the practice of cutting and collage, he created his characters on paper coated with white paint. This work follows the aesthetic continuity of the Psycho-sites series, with compositions not directly referencing reality,inhabited by childlike, identical characters that could be interpreted as ideograms.

For Opera Gallery, Dubuffet is more than a towering figure of French post-war art,his radical vision embodies the spirit of artistic rebellion and innovation that has been a cornerstone of the gallery’s curatorial mission for decades.

“Dubuffet’s work reflects the very DNA of Opera Gallery,” says Marion Petitdidier, Director of Opera Gallery Paris. “We’ve long been committed to reexamining the French post-war canon and connecting it with contemporary sensibilities. His radical language, material experimentation, and rejection of convention are themes we return to again and again.”

Presented during Paris Art Week,one of the most vibrant moments in the international art calendar and coinciding with Art Basel Paris+,this exhibition reaffirms Opera Gallery’s deep engagement with the key voices of 20th-century art. It also underscores Paris’s position as a renewed centre for post-war and contemporary dialogue.

Opera Gallery previously presented Dubuffet in its 2021 Paris exhibition Bal des Figures. With this new exhibition dedicated to the artist, Opera Gallery reaffirms its enduring commitment to post-war French art. About Jean Dubuffet Born in Le Havre, France, in 1901, Jean Dubuffet is known as the founder of the Art Brut movement. Over the course of his forty-year career, he rejected traditional artistic standards and embraced the work of outsiders,including children and psychiatric patients,believing their art to be more authentic and expressive. His own work was characterised by a raw, unrefined style, often using unconventional materials such as sand, tar, and pebbles. His bold, primitive aesthetic challenged established norms and left a lasting impact on post-war art. Dubuffet remained active until his death in 1985, leaving behind a legacy that continues to influence contemporary artists today. His work has been featured in hundreds of solo exhibitions worldwide, including over thirty travelling exhibitions and numerous retrospectives. His works are held in more than sixty public collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and Tate (London), among many others.