JEAN DUBUFFET: THE HOURLOUPE CYCLE
Pace Gallery is honored to present a major exhibition of works from Jean Dubuffet’s celebrated Hourloupe cycle.
March 13 – April 26, 2025
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 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.