HANS BELLMER — 67 photographies inédites, Galerie François Petit, Paris, 1983–84

Galerie François Petit, 196 boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris, 1983–84. Original exhibition invitation card, approx. 10.5 × 15 cm. Double-sided offset print on card. French text.

Issued for Hans Bellmer — 67 photographies inédites, 20 December 1983 – 25 February 1984. The recto carries a black-and-white photographic image: face, hand, obstruction, gaze. The verso reduces the exhibition to script, dates, address, and gallery placement.

Bellmer’s work moved through Surrealism by way of the constructed body, the doll, the erotic fragment, and the image as psychological apparatus. By the early 1980s, his photographic practice was being re-entered into circulation through exhibitions, catalogues, and specialist gallery contexts in Paris. This card belongs to that moment of re-entry.

Less commonly encountered than the related exhibition catalogue, the invitation survives as a lighter administrative fragment from the same exhibition structure. Produced for short-term circulation, examples appear infrequently on the secondary market. As object, it sits between announcement and retained support — made to pass briefly through the gallery system and disappear. Its survival gives it a second condition: invitation, document, and secondary photographic object.

Condition: Very good. Clean, crisp surface with light age toning and minor handling consistent with period exhibition ephemera. Original period item.