Jean Dupuy was born in 1925 in the Auvergne. After a brief period in the architecture department at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he devoted himself to painting, using a gestural abstract style similar to works by Georges Mathieu and Jean Degottex. He abandoned this practice in 1967, destroying a number of works before settling in New York, where he lived until 1984.

Dupuy's first successes in America fall within the tradition of works by the Experiments in Art and Technology group, which, lead by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, aimed to create links between artists and engineers. One part of the artist's production was therefore dedicated to showing the viewer an invisible part of his or her anatomy via a technical device, including a telescope allowing viewers to see their own eye (180 degrees, 1972), a dust sculpture that changed in time to the viewer's heartbeats (Cone pyramid, 1968), and a machine allowing viewers to see inside their own ear (Ear, 1972).

In 1973, Jean Dupuy left Ileana Sonnabend's gallery and organised a collective exhibition in his apartment. The event included approximately thirty artists (including Nam June Paik, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Antoni Muntadas) who were invited to produce ephemeral works. Jean Dupuy therefore gradually stopped creating physical artworks in order to concentrate on performance, becoming one of the key organisers of the collective events in Soho in the 1970s.

1973 was also the year in which the artist devised his first anagram, when, after finding the words “American Venus Unique Red” on one of his pencils, he composed the words “Univers Ardu en Mécanique” [Arduous Mechanical Universe]. This seemingly anecdotal event considerably affected Dupuy's works, as after having returned to producing objects at the end of the 1970s, the anagram game became one of his artistic drivers. From 1979 onwards, he composed many hundreds of texts in this way, generally written with gouache on paper, and sometimes published in art books (Ypudu, 1984).

While anagrams played a major role in Dupuy's artwork from then on, he also created works from found objects (stones collected on the beach, pieces of coral that looked like animal heads, etc.) and reconnected with the interactive devices of his first years in New York (Clé de sol, 1989).

Often aligned with the anagram-making Marcel Duchamp with his Anemic Cinema, the Surrealist fascination with games, and with the technical inventiveness of early burlesque cinema, Dupuy's body of work initially seems to be organised according to a relatively obvious chronology – from his first objects to his performances, and from his performances to his anagrams. This division of his work into periods is far from being incoherent and seems to be punctuated throughout by the notion of “findings”, with all that this word implies in terms of casual ingenuity, of a loss that occurs between chance and searching, and between intuition and intention. Jean Dupuy's approach can therefore be summarised by one of his own anagrams: “Ah, c'est drôle, mais / le hasard, c'est moi” [It's funny, but / I am chance].

Philippe Bettinelli