LE MUY.- This summer, the Venet Foundation (Le Muy, Var, France) will offer visitors from June, 1st to September, 30th:

• The sculpture park, which boasts monumental pieces by artists from the collection as well as by Bernar Venet himself

• Diane and Bernar Venet’s Collection of Minimal and Conceptual Art (which includes work by Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Long, and others)

• The Stella Chapel created on site by Frank Stella for the inauguration of the Foundation last year and featuring six of the artist’s recent Great Reliefs

• Two exhibition spaces: the Gallery, where the Tinguely temporary show is on display, and the Factory, which is home to Venet’s recent works.

The Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, a founding member of New Realism, arrived in Paris in 1952. He is the creator of a vast body of, in his words, “machines that serve no purpose,” yet which produce sounds, odors, drawings, and sometimes their very own destruction.

Tinguely’s pieces were associated with the work of fellow artists, either in homage (witness Méta-Herbin from 1955, the 1954 series Méta-Malevich, and Méta-Kandinsky from 1956); or in actual collaboration with a roster of artists that includes Niki de Saint Phalle throughout his life, Arman, César, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Larry Rivers (in constructing Le Cyclop), and Yves Klein, with whom he elaborated machines that spun monochrome disks (including La vitesse totale, 1958, and Excavatrice de l’espace, 1958).

Yves Klein, who died in 1962, plays a major role in Tinguely’s life and work in terms of friendship and art. He was one of the artists Tinguely collaborated the most with and paid homage to throughout his life.

Two important “machines” will be on display in the Venet Foundation Gallery: Relief bleu hommage à Schmela (1988) from the MAMAC of Nice and The final collaboration with Yves Klein (1988), a major piece on loan from the Tinguely Museum in Basel.

A film about Jean Tinguely will be screened in a dining room featuring a table, eight chairs and a light fixture designed by the artist for the Tinguely Café in Kyoto.

Bernar Venet and Jean Tinguely often ran into each other in the 1960s (when he arrived in New York in 1966, Venet lived in the New Realist’s former studio) and up until Tinguely’s death in 1991 (the same year that Tinguely offered Venet a chandelier for his fiftieth birthday). For Venet, Tinguely’s importance on the art scene, his originality as a sculptor, and his ambition, which pushed his work well beyond traditional approaches, are a source of great admiration.