Guy de Cointet was born in France, but settled in California in 1968. In the early seventies, he began presenting installations and performances in a number of galleries, including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Otis institute, the Whitney Museum, Franklin Furnace, and other venues.
De Cointet's works are texts broken down into their visual components. He was keenly aware of the imprecision of language, and intrigued by the ability of people to quickly gain meaning from ambiguous uses of language, open to many interpretations. Through his books, and printmaking projects, the artist attempted to transform the language experience into a visual experience. He also turned to performance as a way of presenting different relationships between the textual images. In 1974, de Cointet created a play, TSNX C24VA7ME, a play of Dr. Hun, which included props of license plates, phone numbers, movie ratings, and words.
Recently, Paul McCarthy included a tribute to Guy de Cointet in an exhibition at Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble. He says: "[De Cointet] was highly respected and influential in California in the 1970's and deserves more attention now... de Cointet influenced artists as diverse as Mike Kelley, Allen Ruppersberg, Larry Bell and Eric Orr."
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