Bernar Venet (1941) is one of the most iconic figures of the contemporary art scene, a pioneer of conceptual art. In a career spanning more than 60 years, Venet has never stopped asking questions. He is known as the innovator who introduced mathematical linguistics to art. This exhibition offers a closer look at his oeuvre and his significant contribution to the conceptual art processes of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Visitors will see 28 works - both examples from the artist's early oeuvre and works created in recent years. The central axis of the exhibition is mathematics, which, in Vené's words, encompasses "the highest possible level of abstraction in art". The most recent works are part of a two-year project on generative art. The digitally painted compositions are the two-dimensional equivalents of Vené's Effondrements sculptures, where, in defiance of the natural laws of gravity, arcs and angles have collapsed on the ground, creating unexpected configurations. Algorithms are used to generate the images, a technology that is new to Vené and in keeping with his experimentalist spirit.
Bernard Venet's work can be found in over 70 museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others, as well as in the world's leading exhibition halls, galleries and contemporary art collections. His commissioned sculptures are permanently in the public domain in Auckland, Austin, Bergen, Berlin, Bodrum, Bonn, Denver, Neulm, Nice, Norfolk, Paris, Seoul, Shenzhen, Tokyo and Toulouse. Bernard Venet's 18-metre-high, 40-tonne steel object - a tribute to the Olympic torch - is the only public artwork created specifically for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
In 2023, Bernard Venet received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the International Sculpture Centre in New York. The artist has lived in New York for many years, but now makes his home in the town of Lemoy in the South of France, home to the Venet Foundation for the Arts, which has earned the status of a special European cultural destination.