“People say that I’m the world’s last crazy artist. But I am not mad. I am only trying to save my soul.”
The words belong to Alejandro Jodorowsky, one of the most revered figures in the realm of surrealism. A filmmaker, screenwriter, novelist, artist, photographer, performer, and self-described magician whose career has always resisted definition. Chilean-French and profoundly avant-garde, Jodorowsky is less a single artist than a constellation of identities: a creator who has spent nearly a century reinventing himself through images, myths, and transformation.
Now, at the age of 96, Jodorowsky reflects that he has lived not one life but a hundred.
“I have lived 100 different lives and embodied 100 different Jodorowskys,” he says in an interview with The Guardian. “Because we are different people all the time. I died a lot of times, but then I’m reborn. Look at me now, and you see I’m alive. I am happy about this. It is fantastic to live.”
That spirit of perpetual rebirth animates his latest and perhaps most monumental project: Art Sin Fin, a newly completed two-volume monograph published by TASCHEN, which celebrates Jodorowsky’s life and work in its most expansive form to date. Part archive, part manifesto, part art object, it is a lavish testament to an artist whose imagination has never stopped mutating.
Conceived from 96 years of archival material, Art Sin Fin encapsulates the daring and inexhaustible energy of a creator who has always danced beyond convention. It is not simply a retrospective, but a new work in itself, which has been edited, curated, and shaped by Jodorowsky’s own hand.
Naturally, the volumes revisit his brief but legendary reign in the 1970s as the so-called “king of the midnight movie.” Though he has made only around ten films across his lifetime, the director of cult classics El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973) became an icon of countercultural cinema, admired by fellow avant-garde figures such as Dennis Hopper and John Lennon.
And while his mythic heyday belongs to the 70s, Jodorowsky continued making films well into the 21st century: The Dance of Reality (2013), Endless Poetry (2016), and his documentary Psychomagic, a Healing Art (2019), each directed, written, and produced with the same fearless intimacy.
Yet Art Sin Fin roams far beyond cinema. Its scope is total: riotous stage performances, outlandish comic-book universes, mystical experiments, and unrealised dreams. This, of course, refers to his long-cherished, never-made adaptation of Dune, which survives here as one of the most famous “phantom projects” in film history.
The first volume unfolds as a visual feast. Jodorowsky has personally selected and arranged foldout pages, film stills, performance photographs, collages, drawings, and rare archival images. Moving dynamically from one image to the next, the book creates a sensorial narrative; less a catalogue than an immersive journey through his artistic subconscious.
The Death of Pierrot, first play directed by and featuring Alejandro Jodorowsky, Santiago Municipal Theatre, Chile, 1940s © Alejandro and Pascale Jodorowsky Archives
The second volume shifts from imagery into voice. Here, Jodorowsky offers reflections, confessions, and philosophical provocations on each selected work, functioning almost like a voice-over to the film he has edited in book form. In his singular written style of being outrageous, unbridled, deeply human, every image is activated into new meaning, revealing a worldview in which creation is inseparable from transformation.
Together, these volumes form a unique chronicle: a liberating portal into the world of a restless creator who blurs the boundaries between cinema, poetry, performance, mysticism, and life itself. Lavish yet intimate, Art Sin Fin stands as both retrospective and rebirth. It is a work by an artist still pushing against the edges of form.
Jodorowsky chose the images alongside the book’s editor, Donatien Grau, a philologist, close friend, and long-time conversational partner, whose collaboration adds another layer of depth to this deeply personal archive.
The volumes move through fragments of Jodorowsky’s many lives. Several are dedicated to Tocopilla, the small port town on the rocky northern coast of Chile where he was raised. Beneath a still from The Dance of Reality, a semi-autobiographical return to childhood, Jodorowsky candidly writes:
“O divine Tocopilla! The ugliest port in Latin America. In this wooden tongue, my mother gave birth to me.”
Elsewhere, the collection includes stills from his debut feature, El Topo, a Mexican odyssey that detonated the expectations of the Western genre. Its US distribution was bankrolled by former Beatles manager Allen Klein, who, urged on by Lennon, later agreed to finance The Holy Mountain.
There are also glimpses into the unrealised cosmos of Jodorowsky’s Dune, from the disturbing monochrome visions of H.R. Giger to the vivid, eccentric designs of Chris Foss.
Chris Foss, Guild Tug, design for Jodorowsky’s Dune, montage of ink line work and acrylic paint on art board, approx. 63 x 50 cm, 1976 © ChrisFossArt.com/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2025
His fantasy graphic novels appear too, from Showman Killer (2010) and Megalex (2014). Alongside those are Jodorowsky’s theatrical experiments like his four-hour-long performance Melodrama sacramental (ephemeral panic) (1965), further evidence of an artist for whom no medium is ever singular.
Conclusively, Art Sin Fin is exactly what its title promises: art without end. A celebration of a life lived through perpetual metamorphosis. An archive that becomes an artwork. A final, or perhaps ongoing, rebirth from one of surrealism’s last great visionaries.
