Archivio Conz

Jean Dupuy (1925 Moulins, France – 2021 Nice, France) was a French artist, an experimenter in art and technology, and a member 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. 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. 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 catalogue 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. 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).