Bernar Venet

Bernar Venet , born in 1941 with Castle-Arnoux-Saint-Auban in the Alp-of-High-Provence, is an artist French plastics technician, alive with the the United States where it was made known internationally for his Sculpture S of steel and its drawings.

Bernar Venet was assistant decorator with the Opéra of Nice at the end of the Années 1950. From 1961 to 1963, it shows fabrics covered with tar because “the black, it is the rejection of the easy communication”. Its notoriety begins during this period with the realization from a sculpture without form specific made up of a heap of coal poured to very the ground. Its faculty of intellectual abstraction and its taste for the mathematical reasoning and the experimentation lead it to what will be soon the Conceptual art.

In 1966, it settles with New York. Pure mathematics and sciences are to him a recurring source to impose “monosemy” in the artistic camp. From 1971 to 1976, it marks a pause in its research, ceases very practical artistic and returns to France where it writes and teaches with the Sorbonne.

After these six years of reflection, it reinstates its workshop in 1976. The line, under all its mathematical alternatives and its physical demonstrations, takes a dominating place in its work. Fabrics then reliefs out of wood, it passes quickly to the sculpture. In 1983, it sets up the basic structure of its unspecified Lignes . It carries them out in Acier corten and installs them in many urban spaces and public collections, in particular with Nice, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Strasbourg, Beijing, Austin, San Francisco, etc

In 1999, it carries out the installation in Cologne of a sculpture 4 Arcs of 235.5°, at the time of the top of G8. It also carries out an public order for the new university of Geneva.

In 2001, it takes again an old project which it had not been able to make succeed: the self-portrait, very far away from the subjective perception of the artists to which we are accustomed, result of an medical examination tomodensitometric. In the same way, it reactivates a series of paintings on fabric of the Sixties, by choosing reasons drawn from books of mathematics, but with a greater formal freedom. “Saturations follow”, new fabrics on which it superimposes several equations until scrambling their reading definitively. A concept also developed in its photographic or sound activity, like in its performances.

The new sculptures unspecified Lignes of Bernar Venet announce a new orientation which underlines its leaning for the disorder, complexity and the indetermination. They were exposed to Park Avenue with New York, Shangai and lately with Bordeaux (from June in October 2007).

External bonds

Official site
Site of the French gallery of the artist
a bio-bibliography of Bernar Venet
the personal testimony of the artist
233,5º ARC x4 - Bernar Venet

Random links: