Bernar venet biography of michael

French conceptual artist (born 1941)

Bernar Venet (born 20 April 1941) is a French conceptual artist.

Early life

Bernar Venet was born to Jean-Marie Venet, a school teacher and chemist, and Adeline Gilly and was the youngest of four boys. 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. With the support of a local artist, he became interested in painting and drawing at a young age. At age 11, discovering a book on Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he first considered making a career of art.

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.

Career

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."

1960s

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'

Bernar Venet was born in southern France in 1941. He has lived in New York City since 1966.
Sculptor, painter and performer, his works are to be found in the collections of major international museums of contemporary art, including: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Pompidou Centre and The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).
He has participated in Kassel Documenta VI in 1977, in the Biennales in Paris, Venice and São Paulo, and has had retrospectives dedicated to him at the New York Cultural Center at Columbus Circle in New York, at the Museum für Moderne Kunst Küppersmühle Duisburg and Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany), at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, at the Busan Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Art in Seoul (South Korea), at the Institut Valencia d’Art Modern IVAM in Valencia (Spain) and at the Museum of Mücsarnok in Budapest (Hungary). He has also produced public works in Auckland, Austin, Bergen, Berlin, Denver, Paris, Neu-Ulm, Nice, Norfolk, Seoul, Shenzhen, Tokyo and Toulouse.
Numerous monographs have been published about the artist by distinguished art historians such as Barbara Rose, Donald Kuspit, Carter Ratcliff, Thomas McEvilley, Jan van der Marck, Thierry Lenain and Achille Bonito Oliva.
In 1994, he presented twelve sculptures from the Indeterminate Lines series at the Champ de Mars and, in 2011, he became the fourth contemporary artist to be invited to hold a solo show at the Château de Versailles.
Raised to the rank of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 2005, during his career he has received numerous other awards, including the recent 2013 International Sculpture Julio González Prize.
In July 2014, the Fondation Venet was inaugurated at Le Muy, (France).
In 2015, the International Sculpture Center (ISC) announced that Venet will receive the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Selected solo exhibitions

1964
Galerie Ursula Girardon, Paris

1966
Galerie Jacques

His first artworks heralded the beginnings of conceptual art. For over 60 years now, Bernar Venet has been creating outside the boundaries of the main artistic movements, marking out his own unique and unequalled approach, artwork after artwork. He was an established artist in New York before gaining recognition in Paris. His creative path has been an exemplary one, in search of the one piece that would satisfy his irrepressible feeling of discontent.

From the mid-1970s, Bernar Venet presented a series of sculptures entitled Lignes indéterminées (Indeterminate lines, 1979), then arch-shaped sculptures made from corten steel, which would be laid out vertically, horizontally, geometrically or randomly, Surfaces indéterminées (saturation of space using indeterminate lines) or Gribs (short for gribouillages, meaning scribbles), lines drawn with a strong hand before then being recreated in steel. These are the most well-known examples, which have made a lasting impact in the public sphere in France and in a number of European, Asian and American countries. However, Bernar Venet does not wish to be known as anything other than an artist. Even the term sculptor does not really fit the perspective of someone who expresses his work through drawing, painting, sculpture and poetry, photography, performance and music.

At the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire, the artist is exhibiting several sculptures that are perfect examples of his obsession with mathematics. “My work always stems from concepts that may seem contradictory, but that I prefer to describe as complementary. That is how I think, it is my process of discovering different solutions that can be applied to the story behind the sculpture.” (The Hypothesis of Gravity, Louvre Lens, 2022) Now liberated from the “constructivist traditions of intuitive composition, as well as from serial arrangements, a pre-condition for the artists of Concrete Art and Minimalism”, his installations no longer respect these rul

Bernar Venet (b.1941, Château-Arnoux, France), is a French conceptual artist best known for his sculptures in steel that appear to defy gravity. Aged 17, Venet moved to Nice to work as a set designer for Opéra de Nice, before dedicating himself to art making. During the 1960s, Venet developed his Tar paintings, Relief cartons and his iconic ‘Tas de charbon’ (Pile of Coal), (1963), his first sculpture with no specific shape. In 1966, Venet established himself in New York, where, over the next five decades, he explored painting, poetry, film and performance.  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’s career has been marked by a series of celebrated milestones. In 1994, the then-Mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, invited Venet to present twelve sculptures from his Indeterminate Line series on the Champ de Mars. From the success of that installation, a world tour was developed, visiting Asia, Europe, South America and North America. In 2007, Bernar Venet was chosen by the French Ministry of Culture to paint the ceiling of the Galerie Philippe Séguin, located in the Cour des Comptes in Paris. The following year, Sotheby’s invited Venet to present his work on the grounds of the Isleworth Country Club, Florida; it was the first time they had exhibited a single artist at the venue. In May 2010, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France inaugurated Venet’s 30-meter tall sculpture to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of Nice’s reunification with France. Bernar Venet became the fourth contemporary artist to be offered the grounds of the world-renowned Château de Versailles in France for a solo exhibition of monumental sculptures in 2011. During that same occasion the French Postal Se