Bernar Venet

(1941)

© Philipp Hugues Bonan

“The indeterminate line conveys nothing other than its image, it only signals its existence as a line. "

© Philipp Hugues Bonan

French artist born in 1941 in Château-Arnoux Saint Auban in the Alpes de Haute Provence. Beginning his career in 1961 by coating his canvases with a layer of tar and by exhibiting a sculpture composed of a simple pile of coal, the avant-garde work of Bernar Venet was very quickly encouraged by supporters of the artistic scene. French: Arman, César, Jacques Villeglé ...

Already a fan of the brush at the age of 10, he participated in the Péchiney painting salon at only 11 years old. Convinced that his existence will be artistic or will not be Bernar Venet decides to persevere when the School of Fine Arts in Nice refuses him entry. Finally enrolled in another establishment, he gradually trained in the art of coal painting.

If he took his first steps as an artist in the 1950s as an assistant decorator at the Nice opera house, the visual artist asserted his aesthetic personality once settled in the United States. Passionate about exact sciences and mathematics, he develops a reflection on art from abstraction. Disorder and chance thus constitute his favorite themes, as evidenced by the most explicit example of 'Undetermined Lines', a steel installation which makes him known worldwide. Author of multiple monosemias (or one-sided works), Bernar Venet appropriates various visual communication media.

Taking over New York in 1966, he discovered minimal art and continued experimenting with tube plans in his work, reproducing scientific images only for their meaning and the evocation of their formula. The neutral image is freed from the intervention of the artist and the subjectivity of his gaze. He exhibited alongside supporters of minimal and conceptual art: Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin… in the Dwan, Paula Cooper galleries… He then developed a 4-year program focusing on different branches of science and at the end of which he plans to end his artistic career. In the mid-1970s, he allowed himself an artistic intermission during which he became a professor at the Sorbonne. The work he finally resumed in 1976 continued his attachment to mathematical formulas and took a formalist turn in both paintings and sculptures. Chance being mathematical, he declines series of sculptures entitled “indeterminate lines” following the path of the hand without particular aesthetic research, without predefined pattern. Following these, he develops sculptures made up of arches which put into space the steps which both define and compose them.

Deployed in Corten steel, Bernar Venet's “arcs” develop a materiality and a sense of their environment. The lines through their variations: Arcs, Leaning arches, Vertical arcs, collapses… make up the vocabulary of Venet who, through them, addresses the issues of sculpture: relationships to the body, to balance, relationships to the surrounding space…

But the insatiable creator returned to the charge in 1999 with his event sculpture '4 Arcs de 235.5 °', produced on the occasion of the G8 summit in Cologne. Painter, sculptor, designer, photographer or even choreographer, the artist appears as a free electron capable of designing the furniture and stained-glass windows of a chapel as well as of harnessing the wall representation. A creative force that has been exercised for about fifty years.

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