Exhibition guide

The Paris Museum of Modern Art presents the first retrospective of the work of Brion Gysin in a Parisian museum.

Visit details

  • Dates: From Friday April 10, 2026 to Sunday July 12, 2026: Thursday from 10:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
  • Venue: Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, 11, avenue du Président Wilson, PARIS
  • Price: De 0 à 17 euros.
  • Audience: Tout public.
  • Source: Event page

About the exhibition

His wanderings bring him into contact with the most diverse creative and intellectual environments in which he often has an unexpected resonance and enjoys an almost magical aura. She then addresses the different facets of her creative process: Cut-up and permutations; From the mid-1970s until his death in 1986, he moved into an apartment located opposite the Center Pompidou. finally the use of photography as a sign of its relationship to reality and of photomontage as a revealer of its presence in the world.

The exhibition highlights all the dimensions and potentialities of Cut-up, a techniqueNourished by these encounters, his incessant creative impulse was expressed through forms such as sound and visual poetry, experimental cinema, performance, novels and music, without forgetting painting and photography.

The exhibition retraces the major stages of this extraordinary journey which crosses all the avant-gardes of the 20th century and shows, in counterpoint, the works of artists with whom he was close or whom he inspired: William Burroughs, Françoise Janicot and drawing, writing and calligraphy; Shortly before his death, he made the City of Paris his universal legatee.

The exhibition, made up of more than 140 works by the artist, is built on the Gysin collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, a wealth unique in the world, supplemented by exceptional loans from public and private collections, in France and abroad. The exhibition The exhibition offers a journey through the major stages of the Born in Great Britain in 1916, Brion Gysin is a protean artist, painter, poet, performer, photographer and musician often associated with the Beat Generation. creative journey of this unclassifiable artist. Bernard Heidsieck, John Giorno, Keith Haring, Patti Smith, Ramuntcho Matta…

It also testifies to the very strong ties which unite Brion Gysin to Paris where he lived a large part of his life. the adventure of the Dreamachine; Inventor of the Cut-up and the Dreamachine, his work unfolds at the intersection of painting and writing, mobilizing a constantly renewed range of visual languages. It opens with a selection of works illustrating his interest in dreams, surrealism and the effects of drugs on the mind. He stayed there in the 1930s when he was a student at the Sorbonne. the different forms of play and performance; Passionate about otherness and surveyor of the margins, Brion Gysin travels the world and frequents alternative and underground movements. The exhibition continues by showing the impact that the main places of his travels around the world had on him. At the turn of the 1960s, he frequented surrealist circles, at the famous Beat Hotel (9, rue Gît-le-Cœur, Paris 6th). his forays into the territories of magic and the truly bewitching effect he had on his contemporaries;