Jean Dubuffet: From Painting to Performance in ‘La houle du virtuel’
Palais des Arts et du Festival, Dinard, France
03 June 2026
From 31 May to 20 September 2026, the Palais des Arts et du Festival in Dinard presents ‘Jean Dubuffet. La houle du virtuel (1962–1974)’, a major exhibition organised in close collaboration with the Fondation Dubuffet. Bringing together more than one hundred works from the Foundation alongside exceptional loans from institutions including the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Musée de Grenoble and Opera Gallery, the exhibition offers a rare and ambitious exploration of L’Hourloupe, one of the most prolific and emblematic cycles in Jean Dubuffet’s oeuvre.
Developed between 1962 and 1974, L’Hourloupe emerged from a series of spontaneous ballpoint pen drawings and evolved into a vast visual language of interlocking forms, animated by Dubuffet’s distinctive palette of red, blue, black and white— among these works are Personnage I - X (Pour 'Mordicus') (1962) and Passe cortège (La Procession)(1965). Across paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural environments and performance elements, the exhibition traces the expansion of this singular universe in which distinctions between imagination and reality, object and environment, become increasingly unstable. Conceived through a chrono-thematic approach, the presentation highlights the extraordinary diversity of a body of work that continuously challenged aesthetic conventions and redefined the possibilities of artistic space.
A central focus of the exhibition is Coucou Bazar, Dubuffet’s experimental “animated painting” created in the early 1970s. Combining costumes, painted sets, music and choreography, the work transformed L’Hourloupe into an artwork that blurred the boundaries between visual art and live performance. Through archival material, costumes and audiovisual documentation, visitors are invited to rediscover this rarely presented project, originally staged only a handful of times, notably at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Grand Palais in Paris.
By bringing together illustrated books, paintings, sculptures, architectural works and performative elements within a single parcours, ‘Jean Dubuffet. La houle du virtuel’ offers an unprecedented overview of one of the most radical and immersive chapters of post-war art. More than a retrospective, the exhibition invites viewers to enter Dubuffet’s “ghostly parallel universe”—a world in perpetual movement, where perception itself is constantly reinvented.
