Position of Two Indeterminate Lines, 1983
Graphite on wood, signed
and dated on the back
81 57/64 x 163 35/64 x 5 1/8 in.
BERNAR VENET (né en 1941)
Bernar Venet i s a French visual artist, born on April 20, 1941 in the Alpesde-Haute-Provence. He lived more than 50 years in the United States where he became known for his steel sculptures and his conceptual art, a movement of which he is the main French representative. He currently resides in the South of France, in Le Muy in the Var, where he opens his doors each year for summer exhibitions of his Venet Foundation, a foundation established under American law in 2014.
His arrival in Nice in 1957 and his contacts with the art world led him to meet Ben, Arman and Martial Raysse in 1961. This period marked the beginning of a long journey for him, which would lead him to conceptual art. Working in monochrome, Venet used several techniques, first industrial paint and then tar, according to him the most direct path to black, which he considered the most absolute color.
In 1966, Venet moved to the United States and with the help of Arman, he met great figures such as Donald Judd with whom he became friends.
He then immersed himself in minimal art and developed a growing interest in mathematics. Bernar Venet began to create conceptual paintings using scientific and mathematical information and exhibited alongside Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Carl André and Dan Flavin. By the 1970s, he was recognized as a major figure in conceptual art. As part of this movement, which is based on a precise and orderly conception of any work, Bernar Venet is logically interested in mathematics. He saw it as a way of extending the field of art, of proposing an additional path to the opposition of figuration and abstraction, since mathematical language is universal and can be interpreted in only one way. From then on, the work can be interpreted in different ways, but the mathematical formula from which it results can on the other hand be looked at with only one level of interpretation, it is monosemic by nature, a notion dear to the artist. From 1976 onwards, Bernar Venet explored the line as a mean of expressing his theories.
His unanimously recognized work has been the subject of exhibitions in the most prestigious institutions,such as the Château de Versailles in 2011. Bernar Venet’s monumental sculptures have also found their way into international urban spaces in Auckland, Berlin, Denver, Paris, Nice and Seoul, as well as into private collections.
The work we are presenting today, Position of Two Indeterminate Lines, from 1983, is characteristic of Bernar Venet’s work at that time, the year of his transition to monumental sculpture. The Indeterminate Line serie, begun in 1979 in wood and then around 1984 in steel, is the materialization of the artist’s theories and research on the nature of lines: geometric (straight, curved, angle) or random (indeterminate line). He proposes works that he conceives as “self-referential” with a single degree of meaning, which exist by and for themselves, without external intervention. This approach joins the broader framework of conceptual art in which the conception of the work is more important than its realization.
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