Brion Gysin, Le dernier musée

On April 10, 2026 at 8:00 AM, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents a retrospective of the work of Brion Gysin.

Born in Great Britain in 1916, Brion Gysin was a multifaceted artist—painter, poet, performer, photographer and musician—often associated with the Beat Generation. The inventor of the Cut-up and the Dreamachine, his work unfolds at the intersection of painting and writing, employing a wide range of visual languages. Passionate about otherness and an explorer of the margins, Gysin traveled the world and frequented alternative and underground movements. His peregrinations brought him into contact with a variety of creative and intellectual circles. Nourished by these encounters, his practice expressed itself through forms such as sound and visual poetry, experimental film, performance, the novel and music, as well as painting and photography.

The exhibition retraces the major stages of this trajectory, which crosses the 20th-century avant-gardes, and, by way of counterpoint, presents works by artists with whom he was close or whom he inspired: William Burroughs, Françoise Janicot and Bernard Heidsieck, John Giorno, Keith Haring, Patti Smith, Ramuntcho Matta. It also bears witness to the ties that bound Brion Gysin to Paris, where he lived for a large part of his life. He stayed there in the 1930s while studying at the Sorbonne. Around the turn of the 1960s he frequented artists of the Beat Generation at the Beat Hotel (9, rue Gît-le-Cœur, Paris 6th). From the mid-1970s until his death in 1986, he settled in an apartment facing the Centre Pompidou. Shortly before his death he named the City of Paris his sole heir.

The exhibition, comprising more than 140 works by the artist, is built around the Gysin collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, supplemented by loans from public and private collections in France and abroad.

The show proposes a route through the major stages of the artist’s creative life. It opens with a selection of works illustrating his interest in dreaming, Surrealism and the effects of drugs on the mind. It continues by showing the impact that the principal places he visited around the world had on him. It then addresses the different facets of his creative process: the Cut-up and permutations; drawing, writing and calligraphy; the Dreamachine; the various forms of play and performance; his forays into the realms of magic and the effect he had on his contemporaries; and finally the use of photography as a sign of his relation to reality and photomontage as a revelation of his presence in the world.

The exhibition highlights the dimensions and potential of the Cut-up, a technique Gysin discovered in the autumn of 1959 at the Beat Hotel in Paris. This technique, a revival of Dadaist methods, consists of cutting into a text and rearranging the pieces at random. The exhibition also conveys the central place occupied in the artist’s work and imagination by the Dreamachine: a rotating cylinder fitted with slits and a bulb at its center. As the cylinder turns, the light emitted by the bulb passes through the slits at a particular frequency that can induce a relaxed state in the brain and produce visions for the user when they view the Dreamachine with their eyes closed, through their eyelids.

Throughout the route, emphasis is placed on the multimedia dimension of his artistic output and on the dialogue he maintained with works by other artists, past and contemporary (Victor Hugo, Henri Michaux, René Laubiès, Mohamed Hamri).