Brion gysin biography sample
Brion Gysin
British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist (1916–1986)
Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices.
He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he also invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by cursive Japanese "grass" script and Arabic script. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin was the only man I ever respected."
Biography
Early years
John Clifford Brian Gysin was born at the Canadian military hospital in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, England. His mother, Stella Margaret Martin, was a Canadian from Deseronto, Ontario. His father, Leonard Gysin, a captain with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, was killed in action eight months after his son's birth. Stella returned to Canada and settled in Edmonton, Alberta where her son became "the only Catholic day-boy at an Anglican boarding school". Leaving that school at the age of fifteen, Gysin was sent next to Downside School in Stratton-on-the-Fosse, near Bath in England, a prestigious school for boys run by Benedictine monks. Despite attending both Anglican and Roman Catholic schools, Gysin was already an atheist when he left St Joseph's.
Surrealism
In 1934, he moved to Paris to study La Civilisation Française, an open course given at the Sorbonne where he made literary and artistic contacts through Marie Berthe Aurenche, Max Ernst's second wife. He joined the Surrealist Group and began associating with Valentine Hugo, Leonor Fini, Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Dora Maar. A year later, he had his first exh
Nothing is True - Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin
The multimedia artist, poet and novelist Brion Gysin may be the most influential cultural figure of the twentieth century that most people have never heard of.
Gysin (1916–1986) was an English-born, Canadian-raised, naturalized American of Swiss descent, who lived most of his life in Morocco and France. He went everywhere when the going was good. He dabbled with surrealism in Paris in the 1930s, lived in the “interzone” of Tangier in the 1950s and traveled the Algerian Sahara withSheltering Skyauthor Paul Bowles before moving into the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris.
Gysin’s ideas influenced generations of artists, musicians and writers, among them David Bowie, Keith Haring, Patti Smith, Michael Stipe, Genesis P-Orridge, John Giorno and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. None was touched more profoundly than William S. Burroughs, who said admiringly of Gysin: “There was something dangerous about what he was doing.”
It was Gysin who introduced the Rolling Stones to the exotica of Morocco and took Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones to Jajouka where he recorded the tribal musicians performing the Pipes of Pan. It was Gysin who provided the hashish fudge recipe published in Alice B. Toklas’ cookbook, promising “ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes.” It was Gysin who introduced Burroughs to an automatic writing method called the cut-up, a literary progenitor to sampling. And it was Gysin who developed—with Ian Sommerville, the Dream Machine—a device that allowed people, with the flick of a switch, to access altered states of consciousness without drugs.
Working with the authorization of Gysin’s literary executor, William S. Burroughs, John Geiger has produced the first-ever biography of the painter, poet, piper Brion Gysin.
John Geiger’s books have been published in eight languages. He recently contributed to the Thames & Hudson monographBrion In the '60s, Gysin created the Dreamachine, which he described as ‘the only work of art designed to be seen with closed eyes’, and a ‘drugless psychedelic experience’. October Gallery first showed Gysin in 1981. In 2009, his solo exhibition featured Gysin’s 16.4-metre-long painting, Calligraffiti of Fire, his magnum opus and final work, and in 2015, October Gallery presented Unseen Collaborator. Gysin’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; City of Paris Museum of Modern Art, Paris, France; and numerous private collections. His first USA retrospective was held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in June 2010. For sales enquiries please contact: Or call + 44 (0)20 7242 7367 �My given name is Brion. My Celtic mother was thinking of one of those insufferable phony kings of Ireland and spelt it with an a: Brian. Official documents took care of that and spelt it Brion, like the famous wine of Bordeaux, Haut Brion. I accepted this gladly and dropped all my other given names when I became an American citizen.� Educated in England, at Downside College (1932-34), he moved to Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne. Among those he met at this time are renowned members of the Surrealist group, including Max Ernst, Salvador and Gala Dali and Picasso. Gysin�s work was included in the Surrealist Drawings exhibition in Paris in 1935 (Galerie Quatre). He first visited the Algerian Sahara in 1938, a journey that was to have a deep and lasting influence on his life. Equally significant to the form of his later giant landscape paintings were the years he spent in New York working as assistant to Broadway stage designer Irene Sharaff (1940-43). In 1953, having returned to North Africa, Gysin opened the Thousand and One Nights restaurant, where the Master Musicians of Joujouka played an �extended residency�. This was his primary location until 1973, although he famously spent a number of years in Paris where, with William Burroughs, he both developed the cut-up technique of writing and experimented with tapes, permutations and the Dreamachine. In the summer of 1982 he and William Burroughs were the principal artists in the Final Academy show. His paintings are in museum collections in Paris and New York. Brion Gysin died in Paris, in July 1986.BRION GYSIN
A visual artist, writer, performer and cultural visionary, Gysin introduced his lifelong friend, writer William S. Burroughs, to the techniques of cut-ups and permutation. Together, they experimented in sound and image, using collage, tape recorder, light painting, writing and film. They co-authored Third Mind, the term they also used for their creative collaborations. Gysin began his career as a painter in Paris, studying at Sorbonne and in 1935, was exhibited with Picasso, Arp, Bellmer, Brauner, de Chirico, Dali, Duchamp, Max Ernst, Magritte, Miro, Man Ray, Tanguy at Galerie Quatre Chemins, Paris. He then left for New York in 1939. During World War II he studied Japanese and worked as a codebreaker. Japanese and Arabic calligraphy, influenced Gysin’s style of word/image glyphs. Paul Bowles invited him to Tangier, where Gysin remained for twenty-five years. Gysin lived and worked in Paris until his death in 1986.
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Born in 1916, Taplow, UK. Died in 1986, Paris, France. Selected Solo Exhibitions 2015 Unseen Col Selected Writings: