LONDON.- Pace Gallery will stage a rare capsule performance of two characters from Jean Dubuffet’s Coucou Bazar on loan from the Fondation Dubuffet, which form an essential component of the artist’s definitive ‘Hourloupe’ cycle. On the occasion of London Gallery Weekend, this special programme will take place on 4 June, outside the entrance of Pace Gallery at 6 Burlington Gardens. There will be three performances held throughout the day, with activations beginning at 10am, 2pm and 6pm.

Fragments: Coucou Bazar is the realization of Dubuffet’s long-term ambition of creating a living painting and marked the first time the artist brought his pioneering Hourloupe alphabet into three dimensions. The work calls attention to absurdity, blurring the boundaries between art and life. Just as his paintings sought to merge figure and ground, this performance—which incorporated painting, sculpture, architectural environments, music, choreography, and motorised props—created a spectacle that eschewed all conventions of theatre and performance. Through Coucou Bazar Dubuffet imagined a world entirely separate from his own.

This non-narrative piece requires no prior knowledge of Dubuffet’s work. Coucou Bazar brings the work directly to the street and out of the gallery space. It is an opportunity for pedestrians to happen upon a street performance as though spontaneous. This performance reignites Pace Live in London, a programme of dynamic, multidisciplinary public events, which will continue to be a major focus for the gallery.




First performed in May 1973 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Coucou Bazar is made up of several elaborate costumes, props, and backdrops, set against an experimental piece of music composed by İlhan Mimaroğlu. Two full performances have since been enacted: in September 1973, the original performance was restaged by Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris and in 1978 a third iteration in Turin was performed with a revised score. Due to the fragile nature of the elements that make up this extraordinary performance, they are very rarely activated, making this a particularly special event.

At the core of Dubuffet’s non-hierarchical artistic practice is a rejection of the systems that elevate an artist’s status above other members of society. As he explained, ‘It’s the man in the street that I’m after... he’s the one I’d like to delight and enchant with my works.’ The 4 June performance will present fragments that bring to life the essence of Dubuffet’s egalitarian fantasy.

The cumbersome nature of the costumes dictate the dancer’s slow and unnatural movements. Art critic Peter Schjeldahl’s analogy of a limping person to describe Dubuffet’s radical practice, encapsulates this unique performance: ‘Gradually, as one watches, the limp is subtly transformed, becoming articulated, purposeful, inspired—a dance! The person is dancing!’

In honour of Jean Dubuffet’s first major institutional exhibition in the UK since 1966, this performance is presented in parallel with the Barbican Art Gallery’s retrospective, Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty, on view until August 22.

Jean Dubuffet (b. 1901, Le Havre, France; d. 1985, Paris) believed that art must be part of ordinary life and sought artistic authenticity outside of established conventions and an annihilation of hierarchical values. Dubuffet looked to the margins of the everyday—the art of prisoners, psychics, the uneducated, and the institutionalized—to liberate his own creativity, coining the term “art brut.” His interest in the tactile possibilities of abstract art, its texture and materiality, evolved early on with the use of media such as sand, glass, and tar—an employment of matter that characterized his work as well as the Art Informel movement of the 1940s and 1950s. In keeping with his exploration of the quotidian, his use of line and color was redefined in his mature work of the 1960s, dominated by his renowned Hourloupe series, the longest cycle of artwork in the artist’s oeuvre, which spanned twelve years from 1962 to 1974. Dubuffet maintained an active career in his later years, prolifically creating paintings, works on paper, and monumental sculpture.