Robert Filliou – Hand Show, 1967

Could the secret of art be written in the palm of an artist’s hand? With Hand Show, made in collaboration with the photographer Scott Hyde, Filliou set out to find the answer. The series brings together photographs of the hands of twenty-four artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Pol Bury, Andy Warhol, Hyde and Filliou himself. In an accompanying text, Filliou wonders whether every line, marking and crease might reveal the source of artistic creativity. The experiment reaches the opposite conclusion. No distinctive pattern emerges. The artists’ hands turn out to be ordinary hands after all. For Filliou, this confirms what he called Permanent Creation: the idea that creativity belongs to everyone. It is, quite literally, in everybody’s hands.

At the core of Robert Filliou’s practice are ideas of language, play and exchange. Trained in economics and associated with Fluxus, he conceived art as a continuous, collective activity embedded in everyday life. His work challenges conventional notions of authorship, value and production, favouring openness, humour and participation. Through gestures that blur the boundaries between art and non-art, Filliou redefined creation as an ongoing process of thinking, making and sharing, an approach that continues to shape the understanding of art as a space of exchange.