Bernar Venet

BIO
Bernar Venet was born in Château-Arnoux, France, in 1941. In 1958, at 17, Venet moved to Nice to study at the Villa Thiole, the municipal art school. He immersed himself in the cultural life in Nice and became an assistant to the decorator at the Nice City Opera.

Over the course of the next two decades, he explored painting, poetry, film and dance, and was attracted in particular to pure science as a subject for art. In 1979, Venet began a series of wood reliefs, Arcs, Angles, Diagonals and created the first of his Indeterminate Lines. That same year, he was awarded an artist grant by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1984, he started working at the Atelier Marioni, a foundry and ironworks in the Vosges region of France. Five years later, he acquired a steel factory in Le Muy in the Var region of France, where he fabricated and installed his work on the surrounding property.

Venet’s work can be seen in major museums and collections throughout the world, including the Denver Art Museum; Fondation Mourtala, Dakar, Senegal; Milwaukee Art Museum; He Xiangning Art Gallery, Shenzhen, China; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea;

Jumex Foundation, Mexico City, Mexico; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

ART
These sculptures by Bernar Venet are precisely as described by the title—five beams of steel rolled into a 230.5 degree arc, plus two additional arcs—one 235.5 degrees, the other 232.5 degrees. Each is constructed of four beams of steel. Throughout his career, Venet works to redefine art and to separate himself from the idea that art is the expression of the artist. For him the most important element in a work of art is the concept or idea involved. In his recent work, Venet creates works based on mathematical graphs and formulas. In mathematics, Venet discovered a language of symbols that satisfied his desire to create an art that is non-expressive and not subject to personal interpretation.

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