ON VIEW

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. 

The Hourloupe cycle was the longest lasting series of Dubuffet’s career, comprising works created between 1962 and 1974. The Hourloupe style emerged in the early 1960s from Dubuffet’s Paris Circus period, the result of casual experiments with felt-tip markers. Creating absent-minded doodles in red, black, and blue pen while chatting on the telephone, Dubuffet arrived at a visual language resembling a web of meandering lines. These lines create interlocking shapes of negative space, which lock together like puzzle pieces. Over the course of more than ten years, he produced some of his best-known drawings, paintings, sculptures, and large-scale public environments in this style, comprising the cycle known as L’Hourloupe. 

Among the many sculptural works that evolved out of Dubuffet's L’Hourloupe paintings, are several tower forms. Some, like Tower of Lace, are knobby, irregular columns, while others suggest trees or architectural structures. Dubuffet's signature graphic style of outlined, undulating shapes and bright colors here serve to make an even more exuberant, turbulent surface. Without a figurative element, Dubuffet has created a form that seems witty and full of life and energy.