Guy de Cointet (1934-1983) is typically the ‘artist of the artists’; a secret figure who lived in Los Angeles most of his life, where he developed a polymorphic corpus of works. His practice could be described as ‘theatre in an enlarged field’. Guy de Cointet has written more than twenty plays, half of which were staged during his lifetime. As a Frenchman in the U.S.A. and a perfect observer of the society of entertainment with its soap operas, body building and ‘serious doctors’, he created a body of work that investigates the borders between high and low, performance and sculpture, theatre and everyday life.

Marie de Brugerolle is an art historian, curator and dramatist. She is professor at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. In 1996 she first included his work in the exhibition And Gravity, co-curated with Paul McCarthy at CNAC – Le Magasin in Grenoble. She organized the first European survey of Guy de Cointet, Who’s that Guy?, at MAMCO, Geneva, in 2004 and presented his oeuvre in the context of the work of Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley and Catherine Sullivan in Faire des choses avec des mots/Making words with things at CRAC, Sète, in 2006. The play Tell Me was first remade for this show and then restaged at the Tate Modern, London, in 2007, at STUK arts centre in Leuven in 2007 and at the Festival a/d Werf in Utrecht in 2008. De Cointet’s plays Two Drawings and My Father’s Diary were staged at de Appel arts centre in 2008. Marie de Brugerolle authored the first monograph about Guy de Cointet, which will be published by JRP|Ringier in 2011. Her documentary film Who’s that Guy?… tell me more about Guy de Cointet will be presented to the public in the winter of 2011.