Bernar Venet

Bernar Venet: Beyond Concept and Matter

Phoenix Center, Beijing

Organised in honour of the 60^th anniversary of diplomatic relations between France and China, this exhibition dedicated to the work of Bernar Venet is the artist’s first retrospective in China.

The Phoenix Center, in collaboration with the Central Academy of Fine Arts, presents an exceptional and previously unseen ensemble of over one hundred historical works: from the artist’s early performances, his Goudrons paintings, Cartons reliefs, mathematical sculptures and paintings, to photographs, sound works, and films. A comprehensive panorama of sixty years of creation, blending science, astrophysics, nuclear physics, mathematical logic, and semiology.

Curators
Jonas Stampe, art historian and Chief Curator at the Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing
Xiao Ge, artist, exhibition curator, and Director of the Phoenix Center, Beijing

Benar Venet – Artist of the Year 2022

Benar Venet receives the American Friends of Museums in Israel’s Artist of the Year 2022 award.

Benar Venet (France, 1941) is one of the essential figures of conceptual art. His works in fields as varied as performance, painting, monumental sculpture, and theoretical writing. Together with the series of Arcs, Les Lignes indéterminées established his status as an essential and world-renowned artist. To date, he is the most internationally exhibited French artist with 30 public sculpture exhibitions and monumental works permanently installed in cities including Auckland, Austin, Berlin, Bonn, Denver, Geneva, Lyon, Neu-Ulm, Nice, Paris, and Seoul, Shenzhen, and Toulouse.

He is the recipient of many awards including the Grand Prix des Arts de la Ville de Paris and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration. In February 2016, the International Sculpture Center endowed Venet with the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award for his exemplary contributions to the field of sculpture. In 2020, he was admitted to the Royal Society of Sculptors.

American Friends of Museums in Israel

For many years the American Friends of Museums in Israel have honored outstanding living artists whose body of work has gained the admiration and respect of the global art community. Past honored artists include: Jaume Plensa | Tony Cragg | Richard Misrach | Desiree Dolron | Robert Longo | Tracey Emin | Ruud van Empel | Thomas Ruff | Massimo Vitali | John Baldessari | Jeff Koons | James Rosenquist

Bernar Venet, 1961-2021: 60 Years of Performance, Painting and Sculpture

Kunsthalle Berlin, Aéroport de Tempelhof, Allemagne

In the most comprehensive retrospective of Bernar Venet’s work to date, more than 150 works show all facets of his 60-year oeuvre.

Bernar Venet Retrospective, 60 Years of Sculpture, Painting & Performance, 1961—2021. is the first in a series of exhibitions to unfold over the next two years in the Kunsthalle Berlin across the spectacular hangars 2 and 3 of Berlin’s emblematic Tempelhof Airport. The exhibition is the internationally-renowned French artist’s largest and most comprehensive retrospective in the world to date, spanning the entirety of his complex and widely diverse oeuvre as a sculptor, painter, performance artist – and radical conceptual artist. The exhibition will bring together over 150 works, reflecting the artist’s uncompromising approach and natural obsession for constantly shaping his environment through his art.

The retrospective charts the trajectory of the artist’s career from his very beginnings in his studio, which was made available to him by the French army during his military service, and from which the cornerstone of a body of work that has repeatedly called itself into question. Venet has consistently affirmed his concept of art as an attitude which extends far beyond the formal and the spatial. His aspirations to this day are firmly rooted in the unbounded desire to simply never accept the world as it is, instead lending it his own perspective. Landscapes and spaces suddenly assume a new dimension, allowing the observer to differently view – and feel – the energetically charged space in which his signature steel lines, arcsand angles are installed.

The exhibition is a personal homage to Dr. Paul Wember, as Venet pays tribute to the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld.

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The Hypothesis of Gravity

Musée du Louvre-Lens

The Hypothesis of Gravity is a monographic exhibition devoted to the contemporary artist Bernar Venet. This monumental work fills the 1,000 square metres of the luminous Glass Pavilion, reconfiguring the museum’s internal and external landscape.

Inside the Glass Pavilion are around one hundred corten steel beams in the form of Arches, Straight Lines, and Angles. Piled on top of each other in a jumbled accumulation on the floor, these sculptural and linear elements, simultaneously monumental and graphic, have collapsed in on each other.
In this work, Bernar Venet is putting forward the hypothesis of gravity as a formal proposition. Matter here is no longer governed by the forces of nature: the industrial motifs are arranged in a disordered way that recalls the spontaneous organisation of plants. The sculpture releases energy and a fierce beauty, offering visitors a physical and artistic experience of space that is poetic and unpredictable.
The work is a continuation of the artist’s exploration of matter, its capacity to resist and its reaction to gravity, and of the question of entropy, which is central to his work. The practice of piling and collapsing, and the use of random combinations as a form of creation, are essential to Bernar Venet’s work.

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Black suns

Musée du Louvre-Lens

This sensory, poetic exhibition offers a fresh perspective on masterpieces of the History of art. Almost 75 years after the legendary exhibition ‘Black is a Colour’, it provides an engrossing exploration of this fascinating colour, which has been endowed with a multitude of symbolic meanings in Western art, from antiquity to the present day. A paradoxical colour, is black the absence of light, emptiness, a joyous amalgam of all the colours or something that dazzles ?

Right from the outset, visitors are immersed in a familiar experience of black thanks to artistic depictions of themes that have been omnipresent throughout the history of art, such as night with its dark sky. The colour of beginnings of every kind, and of infinity and timelessness, as well as of death and ignorance, black was a structural but ambiguous element in representations of the sacred. It aroused fear as well as fascination, both of which were sources of the melancholy sought by artists when revealing this colour’s beauty and sensuality in their works.

As a result, black became a colour that was emblematic of modernity in both industry and art. Imbued with a strong social dimension, black was a symbol of power and the colour of elegance, reflecting the codes adopted by fashion designers and artists.

Throughout the 20th century it was used increasingly freely, becoming a visual substance that was endlessly experimented with, as demonstrated today by the works of Pierre Soulages. Inspired by the flat slagheap on which the Louvre-Lens stands, the exhibition pays tribute to its mining past, images of which are dominated by coal and the infinitely nuanced traces it left.

The exhibition features nearly 180 works, intermingling periods and disciplines, and spanning painting, fashion, the decorative arts, the moving image and installations. Ranging from Velázquez and Ribera to 19th- and 20th-century artists such as Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Kandinsky, Malevich, Reinhardt and Soulages, together with creations by designers like Jeanne Lanvin and Yohji Yamamoto, ‘Black Suns’ explores the paradoxes of black and the myriad ways in which it has inspired artists, from Antiquity to the present day.

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BERNAR VENET. THE CONCEPTUAL YEARS 1966-1976

MAMAC Nice

In 1966, the young artist Bernar Venet left Nice and moved to New York where he started an artistic revolution introducing mathematics, astrophysics and later many other fields of science and other disciplines into the art realm. In 1970, he forged a reputation as one of the leading lights of conceptual art, a nascent movement that swept across Europe and internationally.

The period 1966 to 1976 was a dazzling and prolific time during which Venet’s intuition and methodic vision set him on an unstoppable path to a new generation at once iconoclastic—pushing art beyond the boundaries of its own definition and process of emergence—and profoundly contemporary since it addressed more than any other art form the question of the dematerialization of art and information streams. This period also marked the beginnings of Bernar Venet’s multidisciplinary approach producing performances and conferences after meeting artists with links to the Judson Dance Theater in New York.

For the first time since 1971, this period, of which little is still known about this work, is the subject of a major retrospective. It gathers over 150 artworks and documents, most them being shown for the first time

The exhibition is extended to the top floor of the MAMAC with a room dedicated to major works of minimal and conceptual art selected from Bernar Venet’s collection, reflecting the intellectual and artistic landscape of this decade and his friendships at that time.

Project organised in partnership with the MAC, Lyon.
Parallel to this ten-year exhibition and research the MAC Lyon major show offers a retrospective of the artist’s full body of work: Bernar Venet: 2019 – 1959.

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Bernar Venet, retrospective 2019-1959

Mac Lyon

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.

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Venet Versailles

Bernard Marcadé - Brian O'Doherty

En 1961, lors de son service militaire à Tarascon, Bernar Venet réalise une performance où on le voit couché au milieu de détritus. C’est sa première ouvre revendiquée. Plus de 50 ans après cette action, l’artiste occupe la place d’armes et les jardins du château de Versailles, à l’aide de ses ” Arcs “, de ses ” Lignes indéterminées ” et de ses ” Effondrements ” en acier Corten au total 8 sculptures monumentales. L’ouvrage, réalisé à l’occasion de cet événement, retrace le parcours visuel (voir plan ci-joint) d’un artiste protéiforme qui, de l’art conceptuel à l’art public, a fortement marqué le paysage esthétique contemporain, avec ses peintures, ses installations, ses performances, ses sculptures, mais aussi ses écrits. L’essai de l’artiste et critique d’art Brian O’Doherty s’attache à analyser la contribution de Bernar Venet aux grands questionnements de l’art et de la sculpture de notre temps. Au travers d’un récit étoilé et polyphonique, Bernard Marcadé met en perspective la figure singulière de l’artiste dont l’extrême rigueur n’exclut en aucune manière la liberté formelle.

Livre relié sous jaquette
232 pages
260 illustrations
Auteurs : Commissaire de l’exposition, Bernard Marcadé – Critique d’art, Brian O’Doherty
Editeur : Editions du Regard
Parution : juin 2011