The New Endorphin Series
Roger Guillemin - Additional Works
Limited Editions of 25

The New Endorphins: "I isolated, for the science of it, these first molecules which were called endorphins, although the name was not mine. These molecules are made in the brain of all of us – yours, mine, and everybody else. And they actually act like morphine, hence the name endo-morphine, shortened to endorphin.

"That was in 1975. And at that time, in the summer that followed that work, I did a series of drawings that were lost or faded away. Later on, when I sort of retired from the laboratory, in the late ‘80s, I decided to use the computer in a more sophisticated manner to do early computer paintings.

"Now I have made a series of images, more or less remembering those drawings I made at the time of the endorphins. And that’s why I called them New Endorphins.

"Some more recent images are called Endorpheins. The root here is the name of Orpheus, the mythological poet and musician who charmed the gods with his lyra but not enough to rescue his wife Eurydice from Hades. There are just a couple of, at the moment two or three, images which are much lighter in structure than the Endorphins. So you see, it's all that simple"_ Roger Guillemin on his new series.