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"When he was doing his military service in Tarascon (in Southern France), in 1961, Bernar Venet delivered a performance lying nestled in refuse. That was the first work he laid claim to. More than 50 years down the road, this artist is taking over the Palace of Versailles court of honour and gardens with his Corten steel Arcs, Lignes Indéterminées and Effondrements (“collapses”). The book published for this exhibition tells this protean artist’s visual story, the story about his path from conceptual art to public art, and the story about how his paintings, installations, performance, monumental sculptures and even writing have made a lasting mark on the contemporary aesthetic landscape.

The essay by artist and art critic Brian O’Doherty in the catalogue published for this exhibition focuses on Bernar Venet’s contribution to the big issues that art and sculpture are grappling with today. Bernard Marcadé’s starlit, polyphonic article provides perspective on a singular artist who is exacting and rigorous, and yet wholeheartedly embraces formal freedom."

Bernard Marcadé
Exhibition curator

Bernar Venet
Bernar Venet was born in 1941 in Château-Arnoux Saint-Auban, in the Alpes de Haute Provence (France). He lives and works in New York and Hungary.

He began his career in 1961 when he coated canvas with tar and exhibited a mere pile of coal as a sculpture. The French artistic scene’s leading figures - among them Arman, César, Jacques Villeglé - promptly encouraged this avant-garde artist to take it further.

After moving to New York in 1966, he discovered minimal art and applied its tenets to his own work, creating blueprints of tubes and reproducing mathematical drawings solely for their scientific meaning. These neutral images were stripped of any artistic intervention and devoid of the artist’s subjective point of view. He exhibited alongside the day’s top minimal and conceptual artists - Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin - in galleries such as Dwan and Paula Cooper. He honed a four-year program that allowed him to delve into various branches of science and decided that, upon its completion, he would cease all artistic activities. That ending came in 1971, and from there Bernar Venet concentrated on retrospectives of his work and speaking engagements around the world (including a lecture cycle at the Sorbonne). When he resumed his artistic career in 1976, he continued his work with mathematical formulae again, but this time his paintings and sculptures took a formalist turn. He distilled the notion that randomness is mathematical into a series of Indeterminate Line sculptures, “doodling” them with no particular aesthetic agenda or predefined pattern. Then he moved on to sculptures comprised of segments of circles - Arcs - of varying lengths, the degrees of which both define and compose them. There is something striking about Bernar Venet’s Cor-ten steel arcs, both in their materiality and in the way in which they provide meaning for their surroundings. The line in all its variants - arcs, leaning arcs, vertical arcs, collapsed arcs and so on - compose Venet’s vocabulary, which he uses to broach the issues that sculptures must address, namely the relationship with the body, with equilibrium, and with the environment.

Venet’s renown has only increased with world-wide exhibitions featuring his sculptures across four continents. In Versailles, his sculptures will take their place amongst the eminently classical and distinctly geometrical Palace gardens, which embody and radiate the rules of perspective. The artist is fully aware of the symbolic aura enveloping this place; he set out to underscore the formal lines, capture the coherence, and cast a new light on these environs, on occasion by using contrast, i.e. his decision to install a collapse of arcs - something that looks like a wreck, not lacking in form yet deliberately anti-formal - between the Bassin d’Apollon and the Grand Canal, enthroned in the architectural gem par-excellence that is Versailles.