Bernar Venet, (Chateau-Saint-Auban, France, 1941-), 217.5 Arcs x 13, Installation on English Bay at Sunset Beach, Vancouver, Canada.
Bernar Venet, (Chateau-Saint-Auban, France, 1941-), Arc de 124,5°, 1987, Corten-Stahl, 40 x 12 Meter. An der Urania 17, Berlin-Schöneberg, Photo Axel Mauruszat.
Extrait de La Courbure de l’Art © Jacques Charlier.
Bernar Venet, 83.5? Arc x 14, 2006, 171 (h) x 865 x 360 cm, Acier Corten, Collection privée, Suisse, © Archives Bernar Venet, New York.
Bernar Venet, (Chateau-Saint-Auban, France, 1941-), Arc de 124,5°, 1987, Corten-Stahl, 40 x 12 Meter. An der Urania 17, Berlin-Schöneberg, Photo Axel Mauruszat. |
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Centre for Fine Arts
10, rue Royale Koningsstraat
02 507 82 00
Brussels
Bernar Venet
& Jacques Charlier:
Disorder
May 27-August 30, 2009
Conceptual, sculptural and pictorial, Bernar Venet’s work has developed over a period of nearly 50 years in the direction of a continuous reflection on the identity of art. After being an initiator of informal art, he quickly radicalized his position by conflating work of art and mathematical diagram into a single entity. Excluding any concern for expressivity, he took abstraction to its extreme via the non-referential, ending up with monosemic works. His interest for the mathematically conceived line led him to work with Corten steel bars, declined in angles, arcs, straight lines, and later bent, rolled up on themselves, in a creative process which brings into play both the risk of physical commitment and the uncertainty of the result. Concepts that are strongly present in his Indeterminate Lines, Accidents, or very recently, Collapses to the ground of arches, are presented for the first time in the Victor Horta Hall of the Centre for Fine Arts. Here mathematical rigour is associated to the random variable, another and equally scientific datum from the law of probabilities. Hence disorder.
His exhibition also includes a new series of paintings from 2009, called Saturations, which return to and superpose mathematical data in a synthetic mixture. During the private viewing the artist produced a pictorial performance using a steel bar.
In turn, Belgian visual artist Jacques Charlier, a Trojan horse of international art, is exhibiting for the first time the unpublished plates of a cartoon strip entitled The curve of art, a work produced at the initiative of Art et Acier to mark the 2004 Bernar Venet exhibition in Liège. This cartoon strip, an art book in its way, links Bernar Venet's life with his artistic work and establishes connections, not without the usual humour, with other famous actors, attitudes and practices of contemporary art.
French artist Bernar Venet was born in 1941 at Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban. He lives between France and New York. An internationally recognized artist, he has produced steel sculptures, drawings, paintings, performances, and also works with sound.
Before settling in New York in 1966, breaking radically with current practice he produced performances, monochrome black paintings on cardboard, photographs and an informal sculpture installation in the form of a heap of coal.
In New York he produced his first industrial drawings and the mathematical drawings which would form the basis of his work. Developing his conceptual work, he is also the author of films, poetry and non-visual works of art.
Between 1970 and 1976 he taught at the Sorbonne and lectured in France and in Europe. His capacity for intellectual abstraction, his taste for mathematical reasoning and his experimentation led him to a conceptual radicalization. Despite this, from 1976 onwards he returned to artistic practice, producing canvases of Angles and Arcs, as well as Wood Reliefs. In 1975 he took part in the São Paulo Biennale and in 1977 in Documenta VI in Kassel.
In 1983 he laid the foundations of his Indeterminate Lines in aluminium. Very quickly he went on to produce them in Corten steel, shifting to a monumental style and installing them in many urban settings and public collections, including in Nice, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Strasbourg, Beijing, Austin and San Francisco.
He continued to multiply different approaches of his Indeterminate Lines, on walls, on the ground, in wood with graphite. From there he passed from the line to the point, to the straight line, the Indeterminate Surfaces, continued his experiments with sound and resonances.
In the late 1990s he designed and produced new paintings on walls and on canvas, based on mathematical formulas. These quickly led to the current Saturations.
“Randomness being part of the rules of the game, the objective is to free up sculpture from the constraints of composition and to criticize the Utopian principle of an ideal order.” For this reasons his arcs are piled one on top of another on the ground: Collapses which underscore the artist’s penchant for disorder, complexity and the indeterminate.
Since the 1980s Bernar Venet has exhibited in museums around the world. Recently in 2008, Sotheby’s invited Venet to exhibit 25 large sculptures in an idyllic setting near Orlando, Florida, the first foray by the international auction house to exhibit and support a single sculptor on such a scale. Venet’s work is currently on view at the Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany) and throughout the city of San Diego, California. In the spring of 2009, his work will grace the halls of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.
His works have been acquired by such prestigious museums as The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain (Nice), and Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (Geneva). Venet has also received commissions for monumental sculptures permanently installed in Norfolk, Austin, Paris, Nice, Berlin, Bergen, Shenzhen, Tokyo, Denver, Neu Ulm, Singapore, Toulouse, Sydney and Geneva.
Numerous monographs and surveys of his work have been published in multiple languages including Portuguese, French, English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and German by such noted art historians as Barbara Rose, Donald Kuspit, Carter Ratcliff, Thomas McEvilley, Robert C. Morgan, Damien Sausset, Thierry Lenain and Achille Bonito Oliva among many others. Venet has been the recipient of several distinguishing honors such as France’s Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres and Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, as well as membership in the European Academy and Sciences and Arts.
Since the 1960s, multimedia artist Jacques Charlier has worked from constantly changing scenarios. All disciplines are included, with, in many cases, no formal inter-relationship between styles and forms of presentation. Paintings, photographs, videos, humoristic drawings, critical texts, installations, music and stagings constitute the multiform palette the artist uses to illustrate his ideas, which remain the only common denominator of his concerns. This type of behaviour has led to his being categorized incorrectly among conceptual artists.
Major personal exhibitions include: Centre for Fine Arts in 1983. Musée de Villeneuve d'Ascq in 1989. Fondation Bismarck in Paris in 1990. Charleroi Museum of Photography, Ostend Museum of Modern Art in 1992. Centre Nicolas de Staël in 1995. Casino de Luxembourg in 1999. European Centre of Contemporary Art in 2000. SMAK at Ghent in 2003. Aachen Kunstverein in 2003.
He has also had a recent solo exhibition at Guy Pieters in Knokke. He is represented by the Galerie Fortlaan in Ghent.
Collective exhibitions include: São Paulo Biennale in 1985. 10th Middelburg Festival in 1986. Chambres d'Amis at Ghent in 1986, Charleroi Palais des Beaux Arts in 1984, 1985, 1986. Bezugspunkte/Graz in 1988. Art in Flanders and Wallonia, Paris Museum of Modern Art, Ars Musica/ Brussels 1990. The Belgian accident/Tampa and Orlando Museum of Modern Art. For the Chapelles de Vence/Yvon Lambert, Résistances poétiques /Culturgest/Lisbon/1994. Cross Road/Canterbury-Ipswich/1995. Déraison-Raison/Charleroi Museum of Photography/1997. Protest and Survive/Whitechapel London in 2000. Sous les ponts de la rivière (Under the River Bridges)/Luxembourg 2001. Autour de la Marge (Around the Margin)/Bruges 2002. Beaufort/2003. Wiljk up/Zeebruges 2003. The Uncanny/Tate Gallery Liverpool, Vienna Modern Art Museum 2004. (My privates) Heroes/MARtha Hedford Museum 2005. Belgique Imaginaire (Imaginary Belgium), Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels 2005.
His works can be found in the collections of the Modern Art Museums of Antwerp, Brussels, Ostend, Ghent, the French Community and of Luxembourg, and the Fracs (Regional Modern Art Funds) of the Nord Pas-de-Calais, Champagne-Ardenne, Ile de France and the Pays de la Loire. |
