![]() | You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (August 2013)Click [show] for important translation instructions.
|
Bernar Venet | |
---|---|
![]() Venet in Antibes, 2013 | |
Born | |
Nationality | French |
Notable work | Arcs |
Movement | Conceptual art |
Awards | Chevalier de La Legion d'Honneur |
Bernar Venet (born 20 April 1941) is a French conceptual artist. [1]
Bernar Venet was born to Jean-Marie Venet, a school teacher and chemist, and Adeline Gilly and was the youngest of four boys. [2] He was brought up in Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban and had a religious upbringing, aspiring to become a missionary. He struggled with asthma and academic subjects at school, while excelling in drawing and painting. [3] With the support of a local artist, he became interested in painting and drawing at a young age. [4] At age 11, discovering a book on Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he first considered making a career of art. [3]
After several attempts at gaining a formal education in the arts, he worked as a stage designer at the Nice Opera in 1959. In 1961, Venet joined the French Army whilst also starting to establish his style as an artist. During this period, he painted with tar, creating his art with his feet in a gestural style. This work eventually developed into black monochromatic paintings which eschewed all forms of action painting. [1]
After completing his military service, Venet returned to Nice, where he established his studio and continued to explore painting with tar, creating art with coal, and photography. His early sculpture Tas de Charbon ("Pile of Coal") reflected his obsession with making art that changes the history of art; 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." [5]
Subsequently, Venet became familiar with the work of Arman and some of the New Realists in Paris, such as César Baldaccini, Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, and started sculpting with cardboard. He exhibited alongside New Realists and pop artists' works in the Salon Comparisons at the Paris Museum of Modern Art.[ citation needed ]
In 1966, during a two-month visit to New York City, Venet was influenced by minimalism, consequently incorporating this style into his art (cfr. Tubes). In 1967, Venet moved to New York and shared fellow artist Arman's studio, at 84 Walker Street (formerly Jean Tinguely's). [6] In the late 1960s, Venet's work was published in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde journal which experimented with language and meaning-making.
From 1971 to 1976, Venet did not create any art, entering a period of retrospection. He took up teaching Art and Art Theory at the Paris-Sorbonne University, and frequented lectures in England, Italy, Poland and Belgium. He resumed his artistic activity in 1976, exhibiting works at "Documenta VI" in Kassel in 1977. In 1979, he created a series of wood reliefs, entitling them Arcs, Angels, Diagonals. [7]
During the 1980s, Venet continued to develop his art along logical lines. He also composed, choreographed and imagined the costumes and designs for Jean-Louis Martinoty’s production of the ballet Graduation . In the 1990s, he created his Indeterminate Lines series and subsequently his Arcs, which have been exhibited at various locations, including Versailles and internationally. [4]
His 1994 piece Four Indeterminate Lines is exhibited at the Skulpturen Park Köln. [8]
Venet’s work has become known internationally, with sculptures exhibited in Belgium, America, Japan, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Canada and more recently New Zealand. In 2005, Venet received the title of Chevalier de La Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest honour. [9]
In 2012, Venet was commissioned by Alan Gibbs, an art collector based in New Zealand. [10] His newest and largest sculpture stands in the Gibbs Farm sculpture park. [11] That same year, the luxury car maker Bugatti invited Venet to create a one-off artwork to be applied to a Veyron Grand Sport. The finished work, described as "the fastest artwork ever", was revealed at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach. [12]
Venet has also had a major presence in Asia in collaboration with de Sarthe. In 2012, the artist had a major exhibition of public art in Hong Kong in collaboration with the gallery, showing 7 large-scale steel sculptures in the piazzas adjacent to the Hong Kong Cultural Centre and Hong Kong Museum of Art. [13] In 2019, de Sarthe and Sotheby's co-organized a live performance by Venet to benefit amfAR. [14]
In 2016, Venet was awarded the International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. [15]
Venet was represented by Blain Southern from 2016 until the gallery went into administration in early 2020. [16] In November 2020, it was announced that Venet had joined the roster of Waddington Custot in London. [17] In 2022, in his first exhibition with Waddington Custot, Hypotheses , Venet presented a new collection of his large-scale Angles series, alongside drawings and smaller sculptures. [18] In 2021 he joined König Galerie and exhibited at the Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery in Paris. [19]
Patrick Joseph Caulfield,, was an English painter and printmaker known for his bold canvases, which often incorporated elements of photorealism within a pared-down scene. Examples of his work are Pottery and Still Life Ingredients.
Sir Peter Thomas Blake is an English pop artist. He co-created the sleeve design for the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. His other works include the covers for two of The Who's albums, the cover of the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?", and the Live Aid concert poster. Blake also designed the 2012 Brit Award statuette.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was a Portuguese abstract painter. She was considered a leading member of the European abstract expressionism movement known as Art Informel. Her works feature complex interiors and city views using lines that explore space and perspective. She also worked in tapestry and stained glass.
The Gagosian Gallery is a modern and contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. The gallery exhibits some of the most well-known artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. As of 2024, Gagosian employs 300 people at 19 exhibition spaces – including New York City, London, Paris, Basel, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong – designed by architects such as Caruso St John, Richard Gluckman, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, and Annabelle Selldorf.
Zhang Xiaogang is a contemporary Chinese symbolist and surrealist painter. Paintings in his Bloodline series are predominantly monochromatic, stylized portraits of Chinese people, usually with large, dark-pupiled eyes, posed in a stiff manner deliberately reminiscent of family portraits from the 1950s and 1960s. Recently, he also created sculptures, translating for the first time into three dimensions many characters of the sort seen in his "Bloodlines—Big Family" portrait series. These sculptures have featured in many exhibits and continue his work as one of China's leading, and most highly sought-after, contemporary artists.
Zao Wou-Ki was a Chinese-French painter. He was a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Zao Wou-Ki graduated from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he studied under French-trained Fang Ganmin and Wu Dayu.
Callum Innes is a Scottish abstract painter, a former Turner Prize nominee and winner of the Jerwood Painting Prize. He lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Barry Flanagan OBE RA was an Irish-Welsh sculptor. He is best known for his bronze statues of hares and other animals.
Gow Langsford Gallery is a commercial art gallery in Auckland, New Zealand. The gallery was established in 1987 by John Gow and Gary Langsford. Gow Langsford represents many significant New Zealand and international artists, including Max Gimblett, Jacqueline Fahey, Paul Dibble and Dick Frizzell. It has hosted one-man shows by Pablo Picasso (1998), Damien Hirst (2010), Bernar Venet, Donald Judd (2002), Tony Cragg and Andy Warhol (2013),and is regarded as one of New Zealand’s most influential dealer galleries.
Pablo Reinoso is an Argentine–French artist and designer who has been working in Paris since 1978.
Art Plural Gallery is an art gallery in Singapore. It shows modern and contemporary art and design. It has been called one of the ten best contemporary art galleries in Singapore and in 2013 was named as one of the world's best new galleries.
Fabienne Verdier is a French painter who works in France after years of studies in China. She was the first non-Chinese woman to be awarded a post-graduate diploma in fine arts by the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China.
Chu Teh-Chun or Zhu Dequn was a Chinese-French abstract painter acclaimed for his pioneering style integrating traditional Chinese painting techniques with Western abstract art. Chu Teh-Chun enrolled in the National School of Fine Arts, where he studied under French-trained Fang Ganmin and Wu Dayu. He was the first ethnic Chinese member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of France, and together with Wu Guanzhong and Zao Wou-Ki were dubbed the "Three Musketeers" of modernist Chinese artists trained in China and France.
DE SARTHE is a contemporary art gallery with spaces in Hong Kong and Scottsdale, Arizona. The gallery's contemporary art program exhibits and promotes emerging artists from Asia, and its advisory focuses on 19th and 20th century master paintings and sculptures.
Stephane Custot, is a French gallerist and art dealer. He is the owner of Waddington Custot gallery in London and Custot Gallery Dubai.
Feng Xiao-Min is a Chinese-born French artist.
Waddington Custot is a London-based art gallery specialising in modern and contemporary art. Formerly known as Waddington Galleries, it has been situated on Mayfair's Cork Street since 1958.
Indeterminate Line is a 1987 oxidized steel public art sculpture by Bernar Venet installed in Beverly Hills, California. A later 2004 Cor-ten steel version is installed outside Denver's Colorado Convention Center at Speer Boulevard, in the U.S. state of Colorado. It was installed at a cost of US$600,000. The 33-foot sculpture takes the form of a linear torqued circle.
Noël Dolla is a French Postwar painter. He was the youngest member of the Supports/Surfaces group, which emerged in the late 1960s in France. Since the late 1960s, the artist has had many exhibitions including international exhibitions. Some solo exhibitions include Ceysson Gallery in Geneva, Luxembourg, and Paris, Galerie des Multiples in Paris, Bourgoin-Jallieu Museum in France, MAMCO in Geneva, Contemporary Art Space Gustave Fayet in France, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, Cultural Institute Italo-French in Bologna, among many others. He also exhibited work in 1971 at the Paris Biennale.
Landon Metz is a New York-based abstract painter and conceptual artist, best known for his repetitive patterns, biomorphic shapes, and painting-based installations. Often echoing the architecture around it, Metz's poured compositions are ritualistic in their process and meditative in their impact.