“My goal is to free sculpture from the constraints of composition and to criticize the utopian principle of an ideal order,” says Bernar Venet, 77, whose Indeterminate Lines, Arcs, Angles, Diagonals and Straight Lines sculptures fashioned from manipulated raw metal beams and based on concepts of order, disorder, instability and uncertainty have changed the face of art. Focusing on the concept behind an artwork rather than solely its esthetic, he has also worked in a wide range of disciplines throughout his career, including painting, photography, film, poetry, music composition, performance art, furniture design, ballet choreography and set design.
Obsessed with making art that changes the history of art, his early piece, Tas de Charbon (Pile of Coal), was significant within the context of art history, as it was the first sculpture devoid of a specific shape, where you could alter its size or exhibit it in various locations at the same time, and where the coal wasn’t used to create an artwork, but instead was the artwork itself.
Effondrement 16 Arcs, 2018 PHOTO JEROME CAVALIERE. COURTESY OF ARCHIVES BERNAR VENET, NEW YORK
Now over 170 of his works including drawings, diagrams, paintings, photographs, sound pieces, films and sculptures showcasing the depth and breadth of his multidisciplinary output will go on display in his most comprehensive retrospective ever, which opens on September 21, 2018 and runs until January 6, 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in Lyon. A second solo show exploring his conceptual years from 1966 to 1976 – a critical decade in his career that started in Nice and progressed in the US, when he introduced the abstraction of scientific research and the objectivity and rationality of mathematics to art – will take place from October 13, 2018 to January 13, 2019 at the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum (MAMAC) in Nice.
Tracing the evolution of Venet’s work, the two exhibitions examine all phases of his career: from the age of 20 when he wanted to “remove every bit of expression contained in the work of art in order to reduce it to a material reality”, when he was photographed carrying out a performance where he laid in trash and when he collaborated with scientists from the nuclear physics department at Columbia University on conceptual pieces to when he took a five-year hiatus from art-making before returning with paintings and his monumental Cor-ten steel sculptures today. “It will be a good occasion for people who are interested in my work to discover the real dimensions of what I have been doing, and to discover again the period when I was doing conceptual art, which was very well recognized in those days, but I never had the chance to present it in France that much,” he discloses. “People will be able to discover works that they have never seen of mine. They only know my sculptures. That’s where there is a problem. My sculptures are what we call the tree that hides the forest. People don’t know what else I have done, so this will be the chance to show it.”
Pile of Coal, 1963, sculpture without specific dimensions; and Tar paintings, 1963, tar on canvas. Exhibition view at the Mücsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary, 2012 COURTESY OF ARCHIVES BERNAR VENET, NEW YORK
At the same time, Venet has presented an exceptional installation of Yves Klein’s Pure Pigment artwork at the Venet Foundation this summer, its 200-sqm dimensions never seen before, thus pushing back the frontiers of Klein’s horizon. Pigments without any fixatives are applied directly onto the floor like a painting on the ground in an infinite sea of ultramarine International Klein Blue, stretching out at visitors’ feet, thereby recreating the central figure of New Realism’s game-changing flat work of art that extended horizontally in space, originally produced in 1957. Launched in 2014 with a sculpture park and galleries, the Venet Foundation in Le Muy is the artist’s five-hectare estate in the Var in his native Provence. Formerly an abandoned factory and 15th-century watermill, he purchased the site in 1989, which houses a river running through it.
Here, iconic works from his personal 100-piece collection of conceptual and minimal art by over 80 of the movements’ most renowned figures – one of the most important in the world –rub shoulders with his own ambitious historical and recent creations. We find pieces by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Marcel Duchamp, Richard Serra, Richard Long, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. Celebrating 60 years of art-making and the dream of a lifetime, the foundation is Venet’s long-time work-in-progress and a representation of his ties with famous artists, such as Arman, César, Jacques Villeglé, François Morellet, Man Ray and Christo, who became his friends. These friendships form the basis of his collection, as he had exchanged artworks with other artists or they sold him important pieces at cut-rate prices. Tracing the history of his life, the foundation aims to safeguard Venet’s oeuvre and to keep his collection intact after his death.
Bernar Venet in his atelier in Nice, 1966 COURTESY OF ARCHIVES BERNAR VENET, NEW YORK
An example of his constant reassessment of his work, his Effondrement composed of 16 arcs exhibited vertically at the Château de Versailles in 2011 now lies in a disordered heap on the ground as if it had met with a turbulent collision. Elsewhere, set against abundant vegetation are Arman’s Déchainés (1991) accumulation of heavy link chains, Sol LeWitt’s Horizontal Progression (1991) stretched-out pyramid, Robert Morris’ Labyrinth (2012) wire fence maze and Larry Bell’s Something Green (2017) trio of glass cubes. There’s even James Turrell’s Elliptic Ecliptic meditative chamber with an ovoid aperture in the ceiling open to the sky and a Stella Chapel designed by Frank Stella himself for the location showcasing six of his large composite reliefs, in the tradition of artists’ chapels by Rothko or Matisse.
Through his collection, Venet is not only building his own legacy, but also perpetuating those of other artists. “We are a family,” he remarks. “My work would not exist without their work, and their work exists also because we were a group of artists influencing each other, but finding our own solutions. I belong to that generation. I was younger, of course. Many of them unfortunately have passed away, but many are still alive. It’s my duty to show their work. Many of them were very generous with me, like Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, and gave me a chance to exhibit with them in major galleries in New York. Today, that I can do that for them is really something very natural.”
Horizontal Progression by Sol LeWitt, 1991, concrete, at the Venet Foundation in Le MuyPHOTO XINYI HU. COURTESY OF VENET FOUNDATION, NEW YORK
Today living between New York, Paris and Le Muy, Venet can create from pretty much anywhere. When we meet in Le Muy, the tireless artist was busy working on eight books about his work and had six one-man exhibitions opening by October in Belgium and France: three in museums and three in galleries. His installation of a 350-ton Arc embracing the E411 motorway between Namur and Arlon in Belgium will be inaugurated in the spring, and next year will see him hold shows in Hong Kong, New York, Berlin, Sweden and Finland, while he is currently in talks to have his sculptures displayed at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and to do a museum exhibition in the Chinese capital.