Door to the Cosmos, 2025. Exhibition View. Photography by Pauline Assathiany. Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim
In Harper’s Bazaar, writer Jacques Simonian devotes an article to George Clinton on the occasion of the group exhibition Door to the Cosmos (2025) at Galerie Mariane Ibrahim, presented alongside Nick Cave, Michi Meko, and Zohra Opoku. Clinton’s presence in Paris marks a significant moment, as a foundational figure of American music emerges fully as a visual artist, extending a creative universe he has been shaping since the 1970s. A pioneer of Afrofuturism, he developed with Funkadelic and Parliament a mythology in which celebration, satire, science fiction and collective performance form a radically open vision of identity and expression. Door to the Cosmos allows this visual practice to be understood not as a late shift, but as the natural continuation of a total creative gesture that links sound, image, storytelling, persona and performance.
The article explores the origins of his visual vocabulary, particularly his signature Atomic Dog, first developed in the early 1980s and increasingly recognized as an artwork in its own right. It foregrounds his long-standing collaborations with Pedro Bell and Overton Loyd, whose graphic compositions shaped the visual identity of P-Funk and helped define a cosmology in which bodies, symbols and narratives remain open to transformation. Now 84, Clinton continues to move between music, drawing and sculpture with undiminished vitality, affirming intuition, play, and cosmic imagination as enduring creative and cultural forces.
Excerpted words written for Harper's Bazaar France
