This exhibition presents a remarkable and previously unseen ensemble of 170 artworks, including Venet’s early performances, drawings, diagrams, and paintings, as well as the photographs, sound works, films and sculptures that retrace 60 years of creation. This is the most ambitious retrospective ever devoted to the artist.
It aims to examine the different stages that led a certain young artist, of twenty years of age, at the beginning of the 1960s to seek to ‘remove any form of expression contained in the artwork in order to reduce it to a material fact’. He then went on to appropriate astrophysics, nuclear physics and mathematical logic, and took a break of 5 years before finally returning, albeit unexpectedly, to his easel. These paintings were followed by sound works, poetry, and later by indeterminate lines, accidents, random combinations, and dispersions, culminating in the indefi nite and curved lines of the monumental sculptures in Corten steel, dedicated to the urban space.
Bernar Venet’s protean work remains little known today, partly because it is partially exhibited, in certain ‘periods’ or selected in terms of a specific medium (his works made using tar, and steel sculptures, etc.). Today, it deserves to be seen in its entirety so that the public can gain an insight into the scale, ambition, complexity, poetry and simplicity of his work.
When one retraces the artist’s career, we uncover the context in which it was born (the appearance of happenings in 1959, Nouveau Réalisme [New Realism], Fluxus and the Nice School in the 1960s, the ‘invention’ of minimal and conceptual art in the United States, where Bernar Venet settled as early as 1966), as well as the relevance and quality of its creation. This is the aim of this retrospective.
The exhibition is curated by Thierry Raspail.
The artist
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Nom de l'artisteBernar Venet
Born in 1941 in Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban, Bernar Venet has been living between the US and France since 1966.
His early works contained the seeds of conceptual art, and he was encouraged by Arman, César, and Jacques Villeglé. He settled in New York towards the end of 1966, and he exhibited his work alongside Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, etc. A lover of the hard sciences, he developed a four-year programme, at the end of which, he even envisaged giving up his artistic career. In 1971, he had a retrospective at the New York Cultural Center.
From 1976 onwards, he returned to the arts and his work would ultimately pursue his love of mathematical formulae. He produced notably a series of sculptures called Lignes indéterminées (indeterminate lines), followed by sculptures in the form of arcs made from Corten steel, which constitute some of Bernar Venet’s best-known works.
More information
Bernar Venet's research into materiality, of that thing “there”, directly, without discourse, freed from all “metaphysics”, and his taste for experimenting led him early on to consider the traditional constituents of an artwork in a new fashion in a quest for univocality
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The materials
Bernar Venet usually creates his Lignes indéterminées, Arcs and Angles in Hungary, 70 km from Budapest. In the factory at Nagykörös, he even has his own special team. Tons of Corten steel, in the form of raw metal beams, are curved, bent, folded and twisted until they take on the desired shape. They then need to be ground, cleaned, sanded and polished. In order to transport his monumental sculptures, customized trailers are built, and the works are transported by a special convoy. Then the cranes take over, arranging and positioning the steel lines and arcs.
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On mathematics
“My sculpture has always had a close link with mathematics. Whether it is the geometry of the Arcs, Angles or Lignes Obliques, upon which I engrave their mathematical identity. […] My more complex works such as Combinaisons aléatoires de lignes indéterminées or Accidents may be identified on the other hand, with more recent versions of mathematical theory, like chaos theory, catastrophe theory and complexity science.”
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His interventions in the public space
Bernar Venet creates monumental sculptures, installed on a permanent basis, thereby creating “a change, a disorganization, a disturbance”, according to the artist. In the mid-1980s, particularly in France, there was a renewal of public commissions of artworks, and as a result, Bernar Venet’s sculptures found themselves all over the world from Paris to Berlin, Cologne, Geneva, Tokyo, Seoul, Auckland, Denver, and San Francisco. In 2011, following in the footsteps of Jeff Koons, Xavier Veilhan and Takashi Murakami, Bernar Venet was invited to exhibit his artworks at the Château de Versailles.
On the occasion of the retrospective, the museum and the artist install several sculptures in Lyon: place Antonin Poncet, at the Musée des beaux-arts and in front of the headquarters of GL events.
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The Early Works (1958-1966)
In 1961 in Carpiagne, where he did his military service, Bernar Venet noticed a streak of tar running down the side of a cliff. He was fascinated by the physical properties of this cheap material which had nothing to do with traditional art. In 1961 he made a series of “goudrons”—paintings with tar—first on paper, then on canvas. There are photos from the same year showing him lying in rubbish for his first performance.
“To show a pile of coal, for me, was to display a sculpture which, for the first time in the history of art, had no specific form. (…) The coal, shovelled randomly into a pile, freed the sculpture from the preconceived notion of composition imposed by the artist.”
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Minimal, Concept
In New York in 1966, Bernar Venet met the minimalists Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin. Their approaches found a resonance in Venet’s praise for the depersonalised artistic gesture. This was the period when he designed his Tubes (1966), which were cylinders cut on the slant that stood firmly on the ground because of their shape and because of gravity. An industrial drawing describing all the characteristics of these objects made him realize that “it might be more interesting to provide information about the object rather than to show the object itself.”
“The advantage of industrial drawings “was that they described things, and the world, objectively, concretely, and not according to the subjective interpretation of the author.”
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From the indetermate to the accident
In the mid-1960s, Bernar Venet began borrowing diagrams, theories and formulas from mathematics. He was particularly interested in geometry, and the line became a central element of his work. In 1979, the first of the Indeterminate Lines gave us a freehand line unrestricted by the rigours of mathematical determination. That line led to Indeterminate Surfaces (a saturation of the surface area with indeterminate lines) and Gribs (from gribouillages, the French word for doodles or scribbles); these were lines, drawn with a swift, spontaneous movement of the hand before being captured in steel.
Bernar Venet uses a type of corten steel for his sculptures; it is treated with chromium, nickel and copper so that it rusts to a very deep colour.
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