Bernar Venet

His first artworks heralded the beginnings of conceptual art. For over 60 years now, Bernar Venet has been creating outside the boundaries of the main artistic movements, marking out his own unique and unequalled approach, artwork after artwork. He was an established artist in New York before gaining recognition in Paris. His creative path has been an exemplary one, in search of the one piece that would satisfy his irrepressible feeling of discontent.

From the mid-1970s, Bernar Venet presented a series of sculptures entitled Lignes indéterminées (Indeterminate lines, 1979), then arch-shaped sculptures made from corten steel, which would be laid out vertically, horizontally, geometrically or randomly, Surfaces indéterminées (saturation of space using indeterminate lines) or Gribs (short for gribouillages, meaning scribbles), lines drawn with a strong hand before then being recreated in steel. These are the most well-known examples, which have made a lasting impact in the public sphere in France and in a number of European, Asian and American countries. However, Bernar Venet does not wish to be known as anything other than an artist. Even the term sculptor does not really fit the perspective of someone who expresses his work through drawing, painting, sculpture and poetry, photography, performance and music.

At the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire, the artist is exhibiting several sculptures that are perfect examples of his obsession with mathematics. “My work always stems from concepts that may seem contradictory, but that I prefer to describe as complementary. That is how I think, it is my process of discovering different solutions that can be applied to the story behind the sculpture.” (The Hypothesis of Gravity, Louvre Lens, 2022) Now liberated from the “constructivist traditions of intuitive composition, as well as from serial arrangements, a pre-condition for the artists of Concrete Art and Minimalism”, his installations no longer respect these rules which have become conventional, suggesting “randomness as the rule of the game”.

Bernar Venet is a major name on the international art scene. He was born in 1941 in Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, and declared he wanted to become an artist at a very young age.

From 1966, he spent most of his time in New York, and was a key member of the pioneering generation of minimal and conceptual artists. He exhibited alongside Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin, etc., met Marcel Duchamp and played table tennis with On Kawara. He would soon meet mathematicians from Columbia University and begin to introduce mathematical notions into his work, particularly his sculptures (Arches, Angles, Diagonal Lines) on which he engraved their “mathematical identity”.

He is most well-known for his monumental works in corten steel, and throughout his career he has continued to thrive, and his work has been celebrated in a wide range of artistic fields including painting, performance, poetry, sound, design and photography.

He is represented by the Perrotin Gallery and the Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery.