On the occasion of the retrospective of the French sculptor Hubert Duprat at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, MF Editions is publishing the first anthological work on the artist. Covering more or less the entire period of the artist's activity, this book gathers nineteen texts written between 1986 and 2019. While all of them deal with the artist's approach, each author - historian, writer, poet, critic or theorist, exhibition curator - approaches it from a specific angle. Duprat's work indeed conceals a rare semantic thickness, which responds to the very diversified nature of his interests. The reader will thus be able to (re)discover the links his work has with different periods in the history of art, science and technology. He will appreciate his simultaneously learned and sensitive, bricolous and spiritual, meditative and dazzling, archaeological and anthropological dimensions.
Those who know Hubert Duprat will not be surprised that it was the artist himself who wished to bring together this material which would otherwise have remained scattered. On the one hand, his intellectual inclination, his desire to embrace all fields of knowledge and all types of approaches has given rise in return to a certain variety of analysis, which it is a question here of updating. On the other hand, the ideas developed by the authors, necessarily fragmentary, compose in the anthological form a most enlightening and solid whole. The parallel is tempting with the achievements of Duprat, whose cohesion is constituted by aggregation, in the manner of mosaics or marquetry.
It is noteworthy that the artist has chosen not to reproduce his sculptures, preferring to indicate, elliptically, the productions of all kinds that were the sources. For the unity of the work is also due to the reuse: iconographic or technical, diverted and reinvented, it shows the attachment of Hubert Duprat to survival. The title attests to this, and this work offers another expression of it.

Notes and readings from Hubert Duprat's studio photographs (1983/86), Michel Assenmaker / Hubert Duprat's curious game, or why one whipworm is worth ten camels, Stephen Bann / The caddisfly, the wonder and the monument, Christian Besson / Hubert Duprat, here, after, Fabien Faure / Both, the root and the fruit, Maurice Fréchuret / The excess of concrete, Hubert Duprat's art, Mo Gourmelon / A holistic vision, Martin Herbert / The form of an exhibition, Patrick Javault / The crystalline mind in its forms, Simone Menegoi / The library of the teacher Duprat, archaeology and maceration, Frédéric Paul / The workshop of Duprat, Catherine Perret / Hubert Duprat : subject and motive, Jean-Marc Poinsot / The Trades of Hubert Duprat, Natacha Pugnet / These artists discouraged to compete with art, Roland Recht / In evolutionary terms, Jeff Rian / Hubert Duprat or the endless workshop, Iñigo de Satrústegui / Hubert Duprat what you don't know, Adam Thorpe / The motif, the motor, the model, Ramon Tio Bellido / The beginnings in art history, Linda Weintraub.