Jean Dupuy

Biography

Jean Dupuy started his artistic career as a painter but shifted his practice when he moved from France to New York in 1967. Dupuy experimented with new technologies, and soon became a prominent figure in the Art and Technology movement.

In 1968 he participated with an inventive sound, light and color installation, Heart Beats Dust, in the landmark exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In the early 1970s Dupuy started performing collectively with other New York artists, and his loft at 405 East 13th Street turned into a center for these performances. Dupuy also arranged similar events at the Whitney Museum, the Kitchen and the Judson Church. During his time in New York, which lasted until the early 1980s, Dupuy collaborated with over 200 artists, as an organizer of events and as an artist.

Dupuy describes his experiences from these years in the book Collective Consciousness: Art Performances in the Seventies (1980). In the late 1970s Dupuy began a close friendship with George Maciunas, and became loosely associated with the Fluxus group. Over the last two decades he has devoted himself to the study of anagrams, and has published some twenty books on the subject.

Dupuy was born in 1925 in France. After returning to France from New York, he lived and worked in Roquesteron until his death in 2021.