Bernar Venet Permanent Insatisfaction: Questioning my own thoughts

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Bernar Venet has been pushing the boundaries of art since the 1960s. In a state of permanent questioning, Venet seeks to challenge past criteria, to interrogate art and its definitions.

A permanent sense of dissatisfaction acts as a driving force to explore innovative paths. Venet wished to create the inconceivable, and so started working on his first pieces using everyday materials such as coal and cardboard, and then incorporated the language of mathematics and mathematical diagrams into his work. “I found it interesting to make paintings that had nothing in common with either figurative or abstract art”.

Throughout his oeuvre, Venet creates a new pictorial language, a multidisciplinary body of work, which encourages the viewer the question the very significance of art, or, as put by the artist: “art isn’t made for your pleasure. It’s a form of knowledge. If it does give you pleasure, it’s the pleasure of knowledge”.

Bernar Venet’s attraction to art became evident at an early age. He discovered the work of historical artists through art books that his mother bought him. At 17, Venet moved to Nice to work as a theatre set designer at the Opéra de Nice before dedicating his entire activity to making art. During the 1960s, Venet developed his Tar paintings, Relief Cartons, and his iconic Tas de charbon (Pile of Coal), the first sculpture without a specific shape. 1979 marked a turning point in Venet’s career, when he began a series of wood reliefs, “Arcs”, “Angles”, “Straight Lines”, and created the first of his Indeterminate Lines. That same year, he was awarded a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Venet had his first retrospective at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld in 1970, followed by the New York Cultural Center in 1971. Contributions to major art events such as the Kassel Documenta VI in 1977, and the Biennales of Paris, Venice, and São Paulo, followed. Venet has presented major retrospective exhibitions at the Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg Germany; the Busan Museum of Modern Art, South Korea; the Institut d'Art Valencià Moderne (IVAM), Valencia, Spain; the Mücsarnok Museum, Budapest, Hungary, and most recently in France at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMAC), Nice as well as his largest retrospective to date, at the Musée d’art contemporain (mac), Lyon. Venet is the most internationally-exhibited French artist and, to date, the number of Venet’s public sculpture exhibitions amounts to no less than 30.

Venet has been the recipient of several distinguishing honors, including France’s Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, as well as the 2013 International Julio González Sculpture Prize, the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (ISC), the Prix 2017 Montblanc de la Culture, the Prix François Morellet 2019. He became a fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors in London in 2020. The Venet Foundation, inaugurated in July 2014, aims to preserve the site of the artist’s home in Le Muy, France, and conserve the collection and the artist’s works.

Organised by Professor Sarah Wilson (The Courtauld) and Professor Sussan Babaie (The Courtauld).

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