Raymond Hains
A leading figure of the post-war art scene, Raymond Hains’ unclassifiable body of work is rich with encounters, discoveries, perambulations, voyages, and stories.
Rooted in a Dadaist approach, his practice is based on a system of association, coincidences, and analogies between beings, words, things, objects, places, and images. In the early 1950s, during a stroll through the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of Paris with artist Jacques Villeglé, Raymond Hains removed the first in a long series of posters that he would peel, rip, slash, or tear from public spaces before mounting them on canvas or leaving them on their original background, to modify, or not, the original composition created by the manipulations of an anonymous crowd. In the spirit of Duchamps, Hains continued to experiment with the principle of appropriation and distortion.
