JEAN DUBUFFET : The Hourloupe Circle
Mar 13 - Apr 26, 2025
PACE Gallery, 540 W 25th St, New York, NY 10001
장 뒤뷔페: 우를루프의 세계 Jean Dubuffet: L'Hourloupe at Pace Gallery
페이스 갤러리 Pace Gallery 는 장 뒤뷔페 Jean Dubuffet 의 가장 찬란한 연작으로 손꼽히는 '우를루프(Hourloupe)' 사이클의 대규모 전시를 개최하게 되어 영광입니다. 2025년 3월 13일부터 4월 26일까지 뉴욕 웨스트 25번가 540번지에서 열리는 이번 전시는 지난해 '장 뒤뷔페 재단(Fondation Dubuffet)' 설립 50주년을 기념하기 위해 기획되었습니다.
구겐하임 뮤지엄의 대작과 우를루프 연작
이번 전시의 하이라이트는 뉴욕 구겐하임 뮤지엄(Guggenheim Museum)에서 대여해온 기념비적인 대작 <Nunc Stans>입니다. 이 작품은 장 뒤뷔페가 평생 그린 그림 중 가장 큰 규모에 속합니다. 이 외에도 공공 및 개인 소장처에서 모인 중요 회화, 조각, 건축 모델들이 한자리에 모입니다.
전후 유럽 회화의 위대한 혁신가인 장 뒤뷔페(Jean Dubuffet)는 사회의 변두리, 즉 아웃사이더, 수감자, 정신질환자들의 예술에 주목했습니다. 그는 이를 '아르 브뤼(Art Brut)'라고 명명하며 당시의 예술적 관습에 도전했습니다. 예술가이자 철학자로서 시대를 앞서갔던 그의 작업은 실재의 본질에 대한 근본적인 질문을 던지며 모더니즘 역사에 지워지지 않는 발자취를 남겼습니다.
우를루프(Hourloupe): 일상을 재발명하는 평행 우주
장 뒤뷔페는 '우를루프'를 통해 일상을 대안적인 세계로 재창조했습니다. 그는 관람객이 상상 속에서 거주할 수 있는 평행 우주인 '우를루프'를 제시하며 우리가 알고 있는 현실에 의문을 제기합니다. 마치 따분한 일상에서 벗어나 환상과 가능성이 가득한 문을 통과하는 것과 같습니다.
이번 뉴욕 전시에서는 장 뒤뷔페가 발명한 유기적 형태의 '사전'과 같은 시각적 언어들을 선보입니다. 회화, 조각, 건축을 넘나들며 반복되는 이 형태의 알파벳들은 우리의 지각 방식을 혁신하려 했던 거장의 평생에 걸친 노력을 보여줍니다.
전화기 옆 낙서에서 시작된 위대한 예술
'우를루프(L'Hourloupe)' 스타일은 1960년대 초, 장 뒤뷔페가 전화 통화를 하며 볼펜(빨강, 검정, 파랑)으로 무심코 휘갈긴 낙서에서 시작되었습니다. 구불구불한 선들이 얽히고설키며 퍼즐 조각처럼 맞물리는 이 독특한 시각 언어는 이후 10년 넘게 그의 가장 유명한 드로잉, 회화, 조각, 그리고 대규모 공공 조형물의 근간이 되었습니다.
주요 작품: <Nunc Stans>(1965). 제목은 '영원한 현재'라는 철학적 개념을 의미하며, 과거와 미래가 없는 오직 영원한 '지금'을 뜻합니다.
조각과 건축: 이번 전시에서는 관람객이 직접 앉아볼 수 있는 조각적 벤치인 <Banc-Salon>(1974–2024)과 네덜란드 크뢸러 뮐러 미술관에 설치된 거대 거주 공간 <Jardin d'email>(1968)의 오리지널 모델도 만나볼 수 있습니다.
Pace Gallery is honored to present a major exhibition of works from Jean Dubuffet’s celebrated Hourloupe cycle. On view from March 13 to April 26 at the gallery’s 540 West 25th Street location in New York, the exhibition has been conceived to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Fondation Dubuffet last year.
It brings together a selection of important paintings, sculptures, and architectural models from public and private collections, including the monumental canvas Nunc Stans—among the largest paintings that Dubuffet ever created—on loan from the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
One of the great innovators of post-war European painting, Dubuffet looked to the margins of society—to the art of outsiders, mediums, the incarcerated, and the institutionalized—to liberate his own creativity. He coined the term “Art Brut” to describe the raw aesthetic of such outsiders, challenging the conventions of the period. Ahead of his time as both an artist and a philosopher, Dubuffet’s works posed fundamental questions about the nature of reality, leaving an indelible mark on the history of Modernism.
With the Hourloupe, Dubuffet used his practice as a means to reinvent the everyday in an alternate world. He posited the parallel universe of the Hourloupe, which the viewer was invited to imaginatively inhabit, to critique the consensus of reality—as if one might step through a portal in the humdrum existence of waking life into an alternative space of fantasy and possibility. The gallery’s upcoming exhibition in New York will showcase the dictionary of biomorphic forms that Dubuffet invented as part of the Hourloupe’s visual language of experience and sensation. Charting the artist’s use of a recurring alphabet of forms across painting, sculpture, and architecture, the show will reflect his lifelong effort to disrupt and refashion our modes of perception.
The Hourloupe cycle was the longest lasting series of Dubuffet’s career, comprising works created between 1962 and 1974. Pace, which has represented the artist since 1967, was the first American gallery to exhibit sculptures from L’Hourloupe in its inaugural exhibition of the artist’s work in 1968. A foundational figure in the gallery’s history, Dubuffet has been the subject of more than 20 solo exhibitions at Pace over the course of seven decades.
The Hourloupe style emerged in the early 1960s from Dubuffet’s Paris Circus period, the result of casual experiments with felt-tip markers. Creating absent-minded doodles in red, black, and blue pen while chatting on the telephone, Dubuffet arrived at a visual language resembling a web of meandering lines. These lines create interlocking shapes of negative space, which lock together like puzzle pieces. Over the course of more than ten years, he produced some of his best-known drawings, paintings, sculptures, and large-scale public environments in this style, comprising the cycle known as L’Hourloupe.
Anchoring Pace’s presentation is Nunc Stans (1965), a 26-foot-long painting on loan from the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York for the first time. This masterpiece of L’Hourloupe contains an inventory of characters and forms that recur throughout the cycle and the exhibition. The work’s title refers to the philosophical concept of eternity—the notion that there is no such thing as past and present, but only an eternal ‘now.’
“If Dubuffet teaches anything, it is that there are no conclusions, and no true beginnings,” the late critic Peter Schjeldahl once observed. “There is only the middle, the presentness of life.”
The exhibition also includes the 1966 painting Fusil Canardier, in which Dubuffet reimagines a punt gun as an animated creature, suggesting the metamorphic powers of L’Hourloupe to render alive what was previously inanimate. This uncanniness is reflected in the more figurative sculptures from the cycle, three of which will be on view at the gallery. In these large-scale works, including L'Incivil (1973–2014) and Le Facetieux (1973–2014), faces and limbs are abstracted and contorted but, like Fusil Canardier, retain a sense of anatomical familiarity.
Sculpture and architecture were central to Dubuffet’s process in the Hourloupe cycle. He realized his sculptural works first in polystyrene, which he produced by cutting through the material with a hot wire, creating maquettes for forms that would then be realized at a larger scale. The exhibition at Pace will feature Banc-Salon (1974–2024), a hybrid between a sculpture and an architectural bench, on which visitors are welcomed to sit beneath a sculptural cloud suspended from above. The show also includes the original nine-by-12-foot model of Dubuffet’s monumental, habitable environment, the Jardin d'email (1968), which the artist realized for grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands in 1974 and remains on view today. These works are presented with two wall-mounted ceramic compositions from 1965, as well as Comptoir amoncelant (1968), a still life of a food-laden counter. Together, these works express the artist’s aim to transpose domestic and quotidian scenes from our reality into the parallel universe of L'Hourloupe.
Pace’s exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Fondation Dubuffet. Founded by the artist himself, the Fondation Dubuffet’s mission is to protect and promote the work of Jean Dubuffet.
