Bernar Venet, Retrospective 2019-1959

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 science 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 collapses, culminating in the curved lines of the monumental sculptures in Corten steel, dedicated to the urban space.

Bernar Venet’s retrospective also aims to show how reason and intuition have continuously and simultaneously converged in making his artwork, which feeds on instability, imbalance, entropy, unpredictability, uncertainty, turbulence, chance and incompleteness, a universe with forms that are as clear as they are poetic.

Curated by: Thierry Raspail