Politics in Action Introduction by Francis Hardy, with recollections by Julio Le Parc

An encounter with Julio Le Parc's work offers surprise and delight, but– as his chair made of springs gives way beneath you, or your eye is captured by a sudden and unexpected reflection – it might make you feel more than a little off-balance. For Le Parc, this instability isn’t accidental: it’s a political provocation to take action.

While completing his studies at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Le Parc (b.1928) became immersed in the radical art and politics of late-1950s Argentina. Against a backdrop of political and social unrest, the country’s avant-garde movements sought to revolutionise art making. Emphasising abstraction, scientific rigour and utopian ideals, these movements saw an opportunity to dissolve the art world’s traditional hierarchies. Much of Le Parc’s work is rooted in this period of political ferment and creative experimentation.

When Le Parc arrived in Paris in 1958, the city was still at the centre of artistic invention. France’s embrace of technological modernity also suited Le Parc, an artist looking for new and radical forms of expression. Inspired by the Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely’s call for collective creation through research, Le Parc helped to found the Research Group for Visual Art (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, GRAV) in 1960. Their aim was to ‘demystify’ art, moving the emphasis from the expressive hand of the artist to the role of an activated spectator.

From initial experiments with manipulating people’s vision, the group progressed to activating the viewer’s entire body and mind. GRAV’s Labyrinth projects of the early 1960s transformed the exhibition space into a sequence of sensory encounters with oscillating balls, vibrating lights and uneven flooring. Designed to be unexpected and destabilising, the spaces interrupted habitual ways of seeing and thinking to heighten the viewer’s awareness of their relationship to the art and their surroundings.

GRAV was influential in expanding the idea of participation in art to a broader public. In 1966, the group embarked on A Day in the Street, a series of encounters staged in public spaces across Paris. Commuters were confronted with unexpected invitations to engage in creative activity on the street, transforming routines through play and confusion. Art could now be stumbled upon mid-journey.

Then came the May 1968 Paris uprisings. In support, Le Parc joined the Atelier Populaire, a collective of art students and artists who produced revolutionary posters in the occupied École des Beaux-Arts. Soon, Le Parc was arrested and temporarily expelled from France. While GRAV disbanded shortly after, Le Parc maintained his commitment to participation elsewhere. Works like his Investigation Games took an overtly political tone and, in the mid 1980s, Le Parc would expand on A Day in the Street, organising open-air workshops in public parks in Madrid and Havana.

Staging these works again today, at a time when immersion and participation have become both expected and commodified in the art world, Le Parc’s work retains its resistance.

^{Julio Le Parc: Light. Colour. Action, 11 June 2026 – 3 May 2027}

^{Francis Hardy is Assistant Curator, International Art. Julio Le Parc lives and works in Cachan, France.}

^{Julio Le Parc: Light. Colour. Action. is presented in the George Economou Gallery. Supported by Anthropic. With additional support from the Julio Le Parc Exhibition Supporters Circle (Galleria Continua; Nara Roesler; Estrellita and Daniel Brodsky; The David Bermant Foundation), Tate Members and Tate Americas Foundation}

Around 1964, I began to experiment with manipulating visual perception in my work. I created dozens of pairs of glasses, modified in various ways to reflect the wearer’s eyes and fragment their field of vision. In doing so, I invited the public to alter their sense of reality. This allowed people to view the world in new, dynamic ways, with vibrant, layered images that defied conventional logic

This installation was originally created in 1964 for the GRAV exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the Louvre, Paris. As people stepped onto the blocks, their ground became unsteady, representing the uncertainty of everyday life and the fragility of social and urban structures. Two years later, the piece was recreated outside in the Montparnasse district of the city for GRAV’s itinerary of interactive installations, A Day in The Street. As part of this, Unstable Floor transformed the urban environment into an interactive canvas, on which residents and pedestrians could test their balance as they walked across the moving tiles.

These bouncy chairs – one of which is pictured here in my exhibition at the Venice Biennale in1966 – are another example of what I call ‘elements to experience’. Each stool is mounted on a thick spring that yields to the weight of anyone trying to sit down, causing them–much to their surprise – to fall to the ground. Whenever the participant moves, the chair reacts. By inviting the viewer to physically engage with the chair, the work challenges the traditional notion of sculpture as a static, cordoned-off entity.

This interactive work emerged from discussions in late 1968, in the wake of the May protests in Paris, which I supported and for which I was arrested and subsequently exiled from France. Presented at the Städtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf in 1972 as part of my Investigation Games series, it offered a platform for critical thinking. In Knock Down the Myths, the audience was invited to throw balls at caricature-like silhouettes of authority figures, such as police officers, while Strike the Officers 1971 depicts similar characters on inflatable punch bags. Both artworks seek to question and disrupt social narratives around power and control. A survey accompanied Knock Down the Myths, inviting participants to reflect on the act of playing and the choices they made when engaging with the work.

In the mid-1980s, I revisited the ideas fostered by GRAV’s A Day in the Street and organised a series of outdoor participatory workshops in Madrid and Havana. The Havana workshop, which took place in1986, was a space for creativity and collaboration, and I worked with local and international artists to promote participatory art. It focused on education and the exchange of ideas, techniques and experiences, creating an environment where the community could experience art in a public space. The workshop ended with an exhibition showcasing the works created, highlighting both the city’s cultural richness and the potential of art to transform the urban environment.