RIGA.- From 25 January to 27 April 2025, the Art Museum Riga Bourse in Riga presents a retrospective exhibition by the prominent French artist Bernar Venet, Painting: From Rational to Virtual. 1966–2024, offering a closer look at his oeuvre and significant contribution to the 20th- and 21st-century Conceptual art.
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Bernar Venet (1941) is one of the most charismatic figures on the contemporary art scene, a pioneer of Conceptual art. Throughout his career spanning more than 60 years, Venet has been known for producing work that has never ceased to pose questions, and for having been the principal innovator to introduce mathematical linguistics into art. “Bernar Venet constantly challenges the limits of his ideas, possibilities, life, and art as a process. For him, making art means articulating and transforming while involving various disciplines – science, mathematics, music, architecture, physics, geometry, as well as what is happening in the media space,” says Una Meistere, one of the project curators.
Visitors to the exhibition at the Art Museum RIGA BOURSE will see 28 paintings – both examples from the early stages of artist’s career and new works. The central axis of this exposition is mathematics, which, in Venet’s words, encompasses “the greatest abstraction ever created”.
The most recent works included in the exhibition are the result of a two-year project involving generative art. These digitally-painted pieces are two-dimensional equivalents of Venet’s sculptural Effondrements in which arcs and angles fall to the ground to create unexpected configurations by obeying the natural laws of gravity. Algorithms are used to generate images – a new technique for Venet and in keeping with his experimental spirit.
“I borrow these formulas, these “figures” from science books. It sometimes happens that I add an equation to a figure I have selected, because it complements it, but also because it reduces the formal aspect of certain selected subjects and makes them more complex and less able to be immediately interpreted as a “beautiful image”. My subjects are chosen for their novelty, for their visual originality. And often because of their “difference”, their “distance” from everything I have learnt about art. The use of mathematics, in my practice, is meant to introduce another reality. This is a language that has its own formal peculiarities, its own organization, its own aesthetic rules. What interests me here is the richness of a proposition freed from the stylistic restraints of the kind of art that identifies with the great historical movements of the 20th century,” states Bernar Venet.
Although Bernar Venet is internationally known for his monumental forms, the artist has worked across a wide range of media: painting, installation, drawing, sculpture, stage design, music composition, and even debuting as a choreographer. Five years of intense activity in the midst of the New York art scene enabled him to adopt an original approach marked by bringing monosemic signs into the field of art. This work contrasted with what we’re used to seeing in painting, particularly the polysemic signs in figuration and the pansemic signs of abstraction. This totally radical work, the result of a deliberate six-year pause for theoretical reflection, surged forward anew with the creation of the reliefs and sculptures that became better known to the public. In 2000, Venet decided to return to painting with the presentation of mathematical equations and figures from scientific books to demonstrate the immense visual richness of this rational world that artists have always neglected.
The works of Bernar Venet can be found in more than 70 museums worldwide, including such venerable institutions as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva, as well as in the world’s leading exhibition halls, galleries, and contemporary art collections. Bernar Venet has also received commissions for sculptures permanently installed in Auckland, Austin, Bergen, Berlin, Bodrum, Bonn, Denver, Neu-Ulm, Nice, Norfolk, Paris, Seoul, Shenzhen, Tokyo, and Toulouse. His 18-metre-high, 40-tonne steel Convergence: 54.5˚ Arc x 14 being the only permanent public artwork created specifically for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympic Games.
In 2016, Bernar Venet received the Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Sculpture Center (ISC) in New York. After many years living in New York, artist now resides in the village of Le Muy in the South of France, where the Venet Foundation has acquired the status of a special European cultural destination.
The exhibition, which has been created especially for Riga and the Great Hall of the Art Museum RIGA BOURSE, is being produced by the culture and art portal Arterritory.com in cooperation with Bernar Venet Studio and the Latvian National Museum of Art.
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