Cecil Touchon

Widely recognized throughout the world, Touchon’s work appears in the collections of several major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Tate Modern in London. His works are found in many corporate collections as well, including those of IBM, HBO, American Airlines, American Express, Citibank, Las Vegas’s Bellagio Hotel, Neiman Marcus, Hallmark, and the Sanyo Corporation, to name a few. Cecil Touchon has played a major role in the fine arts arena for well over two decades. The highly acclaimed artist has exhibited in galleries and museums in Dallas and Fort Worth, as well as in New York, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Boston, Houston, St. Louis, and Atlanta, among other cities. International exhibitions include venues in Paris; Amsterdam; Berlin; Cuernavaca, Mexico; and Italy, where he participated in the Venice Biennial in 2009 and 2001. Touchon is the founder and director of the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction and co-founder of the International Post-Dogmatist Group. He is also a member of the Massurrealist Society and founder of the La Sociedad Massurrealista de Mexico. He has been featured in dozens of exhibition catalogues, magazine articles, and scholarly publications.

Cecil Touchon | ARTIST STATEMENT

"The majority of my works that deal with lettering forms originally started out as a Fluxus idea, and that idea was to create compositions out of randomly chopped up lettering and then reconstruct an abstract 'poem' from the parts. I wanted something that frees the words and letters from their practical use as bearers of literary meaning allowing them to function on a purely visual and concrete level."– Cecil Touchon

Collections

MOMA – New York, NY MOMA Library Manhattan, New York, NY Emily Harvey Foundation – New York, NY Museu Brasileiro da Escultura - San Paulo, Brazil Mela Foundation, New York, NY Studio One, New York, NY (Yoko Ono) Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. Fogg Museum of Art Archive, Cambridge, Mass. Los Angeles County Museum of Art Research Library, Los Angeles, Ca The Getty Research Institute - Los Angeles, Ca Modern Realism, San Francisco, Ca Chicago Art Institute – Chicago, Il. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Il. Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, School of the Art Institute, Chicago, Il. Saint Louis Art Museum, Library, Saint Louis, Mo Iowa State University - Fluxus Collection - Ames, IA ATCA Special Collections, Iowa State University, Iowa City, Iowa Avant Writing Collection - Rare Books & Manuscripts Library - at Ohio State University Ohio State University Libraries, Rare Books and Manuscript Libraries, Columbus, Ohio Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, Miami, Fl Ontological Museum, Fluxus Collections, Fort Worth, Texas Longview Museum and Art Center – Longview, Texas Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Mn The Tate Modern – London, UK Tate Britain (Archive), London, UK Museum Fluxus + - Potsdam, Germany Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest, Hungary TAM Archive, Breda, Netherlands

Cecil Touchon was born in Austin, Texas. His artistic inspiration was ignited early and explored throughout his childhood and into his young adulthood. He received his BFA from the University of Texas at Arlington. Throughout his career, which spans over 30 years, Touchon has been collected worldwide and figures prominently in the Massurrealism movement. Touchon is a founding member of the 1987 Post-Dogmatist Group as well as a respected member of the Art Mail and Fluxus communities. Touchon's work was exhibited in the 2001 and 2009 Venice Biennale and can be found in more than 45 corporate and international collections.