Raymond Hains

A founding member of the Nouveau Realisme group, French artist Raymond Hains (1926-2005) was a perpetually restless innovator. In the 1940s he experimented with photograms and optical distortion; in the 1950s, he took torn posters from billboards and reprised them as paintings, pioneering an abstract realism, while also collaborating with the Lettrists; in 1960 he cofounded Nouveau Realisme alongside Klein, Spoerri, Tinguely and others, transposing construction hoardings into the gallery space and continuing his affichiste activities. In the '70s Hains worked with suitcases and narrative photographs; in his final phase, he devised his "macintoshages," collages of pop-up windows grabbed from a computer screen, and developed neon sculptures after the Borromean knots of Jacques Lacan. This book--the first comprehensive Hains monograph, created in collaboration with the artist's estate--follows his 60-year career, elaborating its context and references.