Bernar Venet - Art Plural Gallery

Bernar 

Venet

Summary 

The Paradox of Coherence 6-37 

Art Selection 38-97 

Early Wall Reliefs 39-45 

Recent Wall Reliefs: GRIBS 46-63 

Paintings: Saturations and Shaped Canvases 64-97 

Curriculum Vitae 98-110 

Acknowledgements 111 

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Portrait of Bernar Venet, 2011 

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The Paradox of Coherence 

Artistic production can only result from curious, open thought. It functions as a system whose richness consists of 

accepting, at one and the same time, the principles of harmony and conflict. It is the competition between those 

two elements or givens that creates a whole; and thus the principle of anti-organization becomes a factor in the 

development, the indispensable dynamism of the creative process. 

Bernar Venet, 1976 1 

Bernar Venet has earned world fame as a sculptor of monumental art, but he began as a painter. Today he makes 

both paintings and sculptures which have their deep roots in an analytic program he began as a very young artist 

determined to escape the existing models and to formulate a radical art based on geometric theorems and the 

graphic imagery of mathematical formulas. As an inquisitive teenager he frequented the record store of the legendary 

“Ben”, the Fluxus artist Ben Vautier who drove around in a bus covered with anti art graffiti slogans and was 

a reference point for the international avant-garde. 

Through Ben, the precocious Venet met the Fluxus artists George Maciunas, Robert Filliou and George Brecht 

whose work he appreciated but found too close to Dada. Ben also introduced him to the group of avant-garde 

artists like Arman, César, Yves Klein and the German “Zero” group who were challenging the high modernist abstraction 

practiced in Paris. Although the assemblage artists Pierre Restany promoted as the Nouveaux réalistes 

became his friends, Venet’s natural inclination was to align himself with the more austere and intellectual monochrome 

artists, rather than with the assemblage aesthetic of the Nouveaux réalistes. 

Ben remembered Venet as a young soldier already experimenting with radical art. (Venet was drafted in 1961, sent 

to Tarascon and later, as the war was winding down, to Algeria). During a furlough from the army he visited Ben, 

announcing he was the fastest painter in the world. “I take five sheets of paper, lay them down side by side on the 

floor, take a bottle of ink and spatter all five in a tenth of a second with a single sweep of my arm. That makes two 

one hundredths of a second for each one. Nobody’s faster than I am!” 2 . 

The spontaneous execution of these paintings could be considered a performance and indeed Venet became 

increasingly interested in actions documented by photography. In 1961 he started working with trash, poor materials 

that anticipated arte povera, rescued from garbage cans. The “trash” paintings, which recorded not an image 

but a process, were made by spilling paint on the cardboard panels allowing gravity to determine the direction 

and form of the image. 

1 Bernar Venet remarks, “Published for the first time in the catalogue of my exhibition at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art during the fall 

of 1976, this text is a virtual manifesto, announcing my return to artistic activity and the necessity of being in a permanent and rigorous state 

of questioning.” Lawrence Alloway and Thierry Kuntzel. Bernar Venet, La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California, USA, 1976. 

2 Ben tells this anecdote in the 1977 catalogue on the Ecole de Nice by Ben Vautier, Maurice Eschapasse, Nathalie Brunet, Musée national d’art 

moderne, CNAC Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, 1977. 

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Art Selection 

Curriculum Vitae 

Acknowledgements 

Bernar Venet in his studio on rue Parolière, 

Nice, 1965 

A committed experimenter, Venet had already rejected the idea that art transformed matter or that it depended on 

the relationship of shapes to one another. Once again emphasizing process over image, in 1963, in the first work 

he made as a professional artist, Venet claimed as a sculpture a heap of charcoal whose form changed every time 

it was dumped on the floor and exhibited. Both the specificity as well as the informal unpremeditated organization 

of the material predict the deconstructed elements of arte povera as well as post-minimalist anti-form. 

The 1963 Heap of Coal was intentionally inexpressive. In the tar paintings of the early Sixties, Venet dispensed 

with color and texture. He used tar as a medium because it was free and available but also to avoid oil paint, 

which is expressive of the hand of the artist. He termed the built up layers of tar painted on cardboard “industrial 

paintings” because of their standardized surfaces, which nevertheless do not look mechanical, geometric or programmatic. 

Thus even at the outset of his career, paradox and a sense of contradiction characterizes Venet’s art. 

This effacement of his own hand is typical of all of Venet’s works from the beginning until the present. It was a 

choice made not because he lacked technical facility but rather to remove himself from his work. The Constructivists 

were the first to wish to create impersonal art that effaced the personality and emotions of the artists in favor 

of universality and generalization. Yet we know a lot about the lives of these Russian and Eastern European artists 

who dedicated themselves to geometry and strict theories that inspired Mondrian and later non-objective artists. 

But none managed to so completely efface their own personalities as totally as Bernar Venet, who thoroughly 

erased his feelings and private life from his work to the extent that critics and historians have been turned into 

archeologists in order to reconstruct his evolution as an artist. 

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST 

Scraps [Déchets] 1961 

Industrial paint on cardboard 

Exhibition: Kunsthalle Mücsarnok, Budapest, Hungary, 2012 

Creation is first and foremost a historic fact. This does not mean it should be understood as a simple mechanical 

relationship between cause and effect, for artistic creation is a function of social milieu, personal biography, the 

subjective life of the artist, technical and economic resources, and many other things. 


Bernar Venet was born during World War II in Saint-Auban, a provincial manufacturing town in the northern alpine 

region of Provence. He was a very precocious child who copied Rembrandt drawings with such obvious artistic 

talent that he was invited to exhibit his first oil paintings in the Salon de Peinture de Péchiney in Paris when he was 

eleven years old. The youngest of four boys, Bernar was drawn not to science like his chemist father, who died 

when he was fourteen, or engineering like his brother but to art, an interest his mother encouraged. 

Venet was a quiet intellectual bespectacled boy, by French standards very skinny and very tall. He dreamed of 

being a cowboy in America named “Jimmy”, possibly because the image of James Stewart as the gentle lone 

3 Originally released as “A Summary of Responses to Basic Questions” from 1975, it was published in Art: A Matter of Context. Bernar Venet: 

Writings 1975-2003. Hard Press Editions, Lenox, Massachussetts, USA, 2004. 

Représentation graphique 

de la fonction y = -x²/4 1966 

Acrylic on canvas 

146 x 121 cm 

Collection: Musée National d’Art Moderne, 

Centre Pompidou, Paris, France 

cowboy suggested freedom and adventure. Eventually he would find both in his own nonconformity. But first he 

would need to reconcile the two opposing elements of his personality: intellectual introspection and physical action 

often expressed in a love of speed and spontaneity fighting against the periods of concentration and analysis 

during which his premises are worked out. 

Recent investigations have found that the most highly creative and original artists suffer from various childhood illnesses 

and traumas that take them away from normal physical activities and provoke episodes of depression during 

which mental activity supplants the normal physical outlets of children and adolescents 4 . Bernar Venet was no 

exception. As a child he suffered from debilitating asthma attacks that kept him out of school and indoors with time 

to think, read and reflect. Like Jasper Johns he is an auto-didact with no university education who attended a small 

art school only briefly. What he learned he taught himself in his quest for self-education motivated by a voracious 

intellectual curiosity. 

Before he could move forward, however, Venet had to resolve an existential crisis that caused him to think of the art 

of the past as a prison from which he had to be freed. In 1959 he produced a series of small paintings that he exhibited 

in Saint-Auban before leaving for the army. In Life is a Furlough from Death, 1959 a tiny figure inspired by the 

graphic symbols of Paul Klee enclosed in a square within a receding square looks as lost as a character in a Beckett 

play. The work was painted in Nice while Venet was working as stage designer at the opera. At the time he was fascinated 

by the mystery of symbols painted works titled Tomb, Life, Identity and Christ on the Cross… Given his future 

development one can imagine that this period of late adolescence coincided with an existential crisis of faith. He 

had symbolically painted himself into a corner, Sartre’s Huit clos from which he had to find an exit in order to survive. 

THE SEARCH FOR ZERO DEGREE ART 

Equations 1966-7 



I reject all personal emotion translated onto canvas; we live in an age where industry has taken over… I think everything 

can be reduced to graphs, which have no place for spirit and emotion. Development can only come about 

through logic: this is why I have taken my art in the direction of logic, which relies a great deal on discipline. 


In his influential essay The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes continued his description of what he termed the 

“degree zero of literature”. This degree zero would mean a new beginning of a neutral art of surface free of emotional 

content and distanced from its creator. This was the course Venet decided to pursue in redefining painting as an 

intellectual activity. Today, Venet is world famous for his immense gravity defying steel structures that challenge the 

scale of architecture. Less known but essential to the full trajectory of his thinking are his paintings whose images 

are taken from mathematical formulas. 

4 Schildkraut, et.al. Miró and Spirituality. Wylie, New York, USA, 1992. 

5 Besson, Christian, “Transparency and Opacity: The Work of Bernar Venet from 1961 to 1976”, Art: A Matter of Context. Bernar Venet: Writings 

1975-2003. Hard Press Editions, Lenox, Massachusetts, USA, 2004. 

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Foreground: Pile of Coal, 1963, sculpture with no specific dimensions 

Background: Goudrons [Tars], 1963, tar on canvas, 150 x 130 cm, each 

Exhibition: Mücsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary, 2012 

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Bernar Venet in his studio on West Broadway, New York, 1978 Indeterminate Surface 1996 

Torch-cut waxed steel 

253 x 227 x 3.5 cm 

Collection: Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany 

Venet refused any metaphorical reading of the work, a philosophical position aligned with that articulated by 

Susan Sontag in her 1963 essay, Against Interpretation. The year Sontag wrote her signature statement, Venet 

moved to his first studio on Rue Pairolière, a working class neighborhood in the old quarter of Nice. By that time 

the group of artists from the South of France who became known as the “Ecole de Nice” including Yves Klein 

and Arman, had mainly moved to Paris, but Venet became their young companion when they returned to party in 

sunny Mediterranean port. A generation younger than the Nouveaux réalistes, Venet recognized that their break 

with the modernist abstraction of the School of Paris was a radical rupture with the past, although alien to his own 

austere and analytic vision. 

In 1964, Venet was invited to show alongside the New Realists and Pop artists in the Salon Comparaisons at the 

Museum of Modern Art in Paris. The works he showed were his folded monochrome reliefs made from crushed 

cardboard boxes smashed into rectangles. He continued making cardboard reliefs covering their surfaces with 

fresh coats of monochrome industrial paint each time they were exhibited so that they always look fresh and new. 

The accumulation of layers of paint unified their now shiny surfaces disguising their humble origins. 

As much as Venet denies the influence of Marcel Duchamp, who he admired and finally met in 1967, his methods 

of investigation and discovery and his search for originality parallel Duchamp’s rejection of formalism and convention 

although he never made found objects. Rather he concentrated on found texts. Duchamp held that to think 

differently and to make thoroughly original work, the artist needed to go to a country where he did not speak the 

language, as Duchamp did during his trip to the Jura Mountains with Apollinaire. Venet, easily as French and as 

Cartesian as Duchamp, found himself at first mute in New York. He also followed Duchamp’s advice not to take art 

but rather mathematics and philosophy as a point of departure. And like Duchamp, he set out to strain the laws 

of physics. First of course, he had to learn them. 

At this point the ambitious young artist could have settled in Paris, but instead he decided to skip the French 

capital and head straight for New York... 

NEW YORK, NEW YORK 

My purpose was not to dematerialize art, but to stress, through the use of other media that the originality of my 

work was in its content, the knowledge it conveyed and its symbolic system - and not in its material characteristics 

(or lack thereof). 

Bernar Venet, “Ten Years of Conceptual Art”, artpress, 1968 6 

Bernar Venet arrived in New York City in April 1966 with a smattering of English and only enough money to call Arman 

who was living on the second floor of the tenement where Frank Stella had his studio. Arman was somewhat 

shocked to find his young friend had taken him at his word that he would put him up if he ever wanted to come 

6 Bernar Venet, “L’Art conceptuel a dix ans,” artpress, n˚ 16, Paris, France, March 1978. 

to New York since there was no place to sleep other than his own bed. However, Virginia Dwan was storing her 

Kienholz assemblage of a living room in the cramped studio so for two months Venet camped out on the red velvet 

Victorian couch that was part of the Kienholz tableau. 

In 1966, the tenement building at 84 Walker Street was a beehive of activity. Arman, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean 

Tinguely who would become a good friend of Venet’s, were living and working on the second floor while Frank Stella 

and Carl Andre used the third floor as studios. Although he admired the assemblages of Arman and Cesar, Venet was 

drawn to their pared down conceptual styles as well as to the intellectual works of Minimalist sculptors such as Dan 

Flavin, and particularly Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt who became good friends and with whom Venet traded works. 

On this first trip to New York in April 1966, the twenty four year old artist stayed only two months. That summer 

he turned to Nice and began to study the objectivity of blueprints and the diagrams as possible models for an art 

based on semiotics rather than aesthetics. 

Realizing his art could only develop in New York, which according to Jean Baudrillard had “stolen the idea of 

modern art”, in December Venet moved permanently to Manhattan. Before he left Nice, he designed a ballet that 

was eventually performed in 1988 by the Paris Opera. The original sketches were related to the diagrams he was 

already doing as drawings. The ballet involved a complex arrangement or ropes that held the dancers in space 

across the whole of the proscenium. A rootless young vagabond, he often stayed in Arman’s apartment in the 

Chelsea Hotel, a meeting place for international artists. 

Shortly after his arrival in New York, he exhibited as sculpture a length of industrial cardboard tubing sliced diagonally, 

which permitted a simultaneous vision of both its exterior and interior. They depended on the laws of gravity 

because the slanted cuts determined their positions. The tube sculptures were made with cardboard rolls and 

painted industrial yellow. Others were made out of industrial gray polyvinyl chloride pipes. These sculptures were 

empty; their surfaces were visible both from the inside and the outside. 

Venet had already begun making diagrams and he sometimes accompanied this work with a large-scale diagram 

of its parts and their construction. This diagram is the prototype of the black and white paintings and drawings 

that resembled graphs rather than pictures. He used mathematical formulas rather than text to create a tension 

between image and object that was first explored by Fluxus to then become the formula for conceptual art puzzles 

that Venet ultimately found facile and repetitious. 

Venet’s decision to work in New York engaged him immediately in the current dialogue on conceptual and performance 

art described by Thomas McEvilley. Venet wished to avoid the concept of the “aesthetic”, although 

as critics have pointed out, in the end even the most radical art can be seen as aesthetic after time passes. His 

decision to base his art on the impersonal laws of physics and mathematics was an attempt to free art from the 

familiar designed elements of formal compositions. 

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The definition of the work of art as no more than its technical specifications was a direct attack on the idea of art 

as spiritual transcendence. Venet’s contemporaries in New York were the conceptual artists, but his formation was 

quite different from theirs. Whereas they based their explorations on the disjunction between word and image on 

the analytic investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the verifiability principle of A.J. Ayer - texts that were available 

in English - Venet was inspired by the theories of French semiologist Jacques Bertin, at a time when semiotics 

was barely known in the United States because the texts had not been translated yet. 

Venet had already been drawing and painting diagrams when Jacques Bertin published his Sémiologie graphique 

in 1967, but in Bertin’s theories of linguistics, which defined the three types of visual communication he found a 

solid basis for continuing his use of graphic linear formulas as imagery that could not be interpreted any other way, 

despite the fact that their context was displaced from textbooks to paintings and later sculpture. In France, Bertin 

ran a laboratory where researchers came with drawings for the technical publications. His colleagues noticed that 

almost nobody looked at them and even fewer people understood them. This was precisely Venet’s aim: to create 

a roadblock to interpretation. 

In Paris, structuralism was the analytic method of the day. However, among the first to use the term structuralism 

in relation to art was the American sculptor and critic Jack Burnham who wrote The Structure of Art in 1971. The 

title refers to the structure based on linguistic models within a work of art that reveals how content is signified. 

Burnham singled out Venet as one of the most important practitioners of the structural model in art and reproduced 

his photographic enlargement of a page of The Logic of Decision and Action that Venet exhibited in 1969. 

Venet’s selection of the text was not arbitrary: he was searching for a way to base art on logical and rational decisions 

that would be the basis for a system 7 . For Burnham, Venet’s conceptual work had a double-headed implication. 

On the one hand, Burnham wrote, “He is presenting a text which to some extent reveals the constancy of the 

structure of art-making. At the same time through the dialectical, and thus historical, progression of knowledge as 

an integral aspect of the human condition, he is subverting the historical-mythic structure behind all avant-garde 

art.” This was of course exactly Venet’s intention. 

1969 was a busy year for Venet, now an active participant in the New York art world. John Perreault often noted 

his activities as part of the downtown avant-garde in his columns in The Village Voice. On May 1, he announced 

the Free Art Street Works, a group exhibition in which Venet participated. Among the participating artists were Vito 

Acconci, Scott Burton, Arakawa, and James Lee Byars. In his June 5 column, Perreault reviewed the Para-Visual 

Language II exhibition at the Dwan Gallery and Lucy Lippard’s Art Workers Coalition Benefit at the Paula Cooper 

Gallery where Venet contributed works along with Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt, Bill Bollinger, Robert Smithson, 

Mel Bochner, Michael Kirby, Joseph Kosuth, Adrian Piper, On Kawara, Robert Morris, and Bruce Nauman. On 

December 18, 1969 Perreault wrote: “I have been receiving The Wall Street Journal every morning courtesy of 

7 Jack Burnham, The Structure of Art. George Braziller, New York, USA, 1971. 

Paintings, 1976-1978, acrylic on canvas 

Exhibition: Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Valencia, Spain, 2010 

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9 lignes obliques 2010 

Cor-ten steel 

H: 30 meters 

Installation: Place Sulzer, Promenade des Anglais, Nice, France 

Bernar Venet. Stock market figures and weather reports have been Venet’s special thing for a while now, so I 

guess this is a work of art.” 

Venet photographically enlarged pages of stock market quotes as well as other pages taken from printed sources 

to mural scale size, which he showed in various exhibitions in the late Sixties. Venet’s development reflected both 

the French as well as the American approach to post minimal art. The French part of Venet’s aesthetic derives 

from his knowledge of semiotics and concrete art as it developed in Europe in the forms of musique concrète 

and concrete poetry. Indeed, Venet has created a concrete music composition recording the sound of the motors 

of the supersonic Concorde airplane as well as publishing a provocative volume of concrete poetry that consists 

of provocative lists and phrases. Because of his divergent dual background Venet’s work predicted rather than 

participating in the “dematerialization” of the art object that characterized post minimal and conceptual art in New 

York around 1970. 

Up to that time he had not in fact concentrated on making objects. In her seminal book on art in the late sixties, 

The Dematerialization of the Art Object, Lucy Lippard described how Venet’s conceptual works antedated the 

disappearance of art as specific object, redefining art as a concept rather than as a thing. Concerning Bernar 

Venet she wrote: “Bernar Venet decides to present during the next four years: Astrophysics, Nuclear Physics, 

Space Sciences, Mathematics by Computation, Meteorology, Stock Market, Mathematics, Psychophysics and 

Psycho Chronometry, Sociology and Politics, Mathematical Logic, etc.” She quotes Venet’s explanation of how 

he proceeded: “For each discipline an authority advised me upon the subjects to be presented: these subjects 

were chosen according to their importance… The question was not to make a new object, a new readymade 

out of mathematics. I attributed a didactic goal to their presentation. Scientific diagrams were painted, at first by 

hand, on large canvases; later (1967) some were accompanied by taped lectures and the paintings became photographic 

blowups of texts or diagrams directly from books.” 

Venet’s activity as a conceptual artist did not go unnoticed. In 1971, Donald Karshan organized a retrospective of 

his early work at the New York Cultural Center. With that success in hand, Bernar Venet shocked his contemporaries 

and decided, at the age of twenty-nine, to stop making art. 

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Three Indeterminate Lines 1994 

Rolled steel 

272 x 305 x 411.5 cm 

Private collection, USA 

Exhibition: Sotheby’s at Isleworth, Florida, 2008 

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Wall paintings from the Equation series, site-specific dimensions 

Exhibition: Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany, 2002 

STOP IN THE NAME OF ART 

The conceptual impasse of the “little piece of typewritten paper” is a cliché that has had its day. It, too, became 

a new aesthetic, but looking back on it now, we see that its alleged contribution wasn’t that much to begin with. 

Bernar Venet, “Ten Years of Conceptual Art”, artpress, 1968 8 

When he moved to New York in late 1966, Venet set himself a program of investigation that he definitely intended 

to complete. Four years later, he decided that the conceptual phase of his work was over and that he would stop 

making art. It was a decision parallel to Duchamp’s refusal to paint after he completed Tu m’ in 1918, which was 

an inventory of every conceivable type of illusion painting could produce. Instead of exhibiting, Duchamp worked 

in secret for five years producing The Large Glass, the result of his investigations into physics and optics. Venet 

would follow a similar path, disappearing from view. 

Returning to Paris, he taught art theory at the Sorbonne and concentrated on writing and thinking without producing 

art between 1971 and 1976. The process of finding his own vocabulary was both lengthy and arduous. 

The intentional caesura created by Venet’s decision to return to France, abandon art making and remove himself 

from the New York scene for many years effaced his first New York period of conceptual art and mathematical 

and semiotic investigations. 

In September 1976, his period of reflection and self-investigation over and bored by inactivity, Venet decided to 

start making art again and moved back to New York. He acquired studios first on West Broadway and then on 

Canal Street, where the minimal artists often found modular industrial materials in quantities. Finding himself with 

no furniture in his new studio, Venet designed simple geometric seating and tables as he had done previously in 

1969. They were sent to a fabricator to be made in steel. This was his first experience in large-scale steel fabrication, 

again a chance experience determined by necessity that provided a point of departure, this time for sculpture 

in three dimensions. Indeed these unornamented geometric steel forms, which had their origin in practical necessity, 

could be considered his first large scale sculptures. 

Back in New York, Venet threw himself into the New York art scene, participating in group shows at Leo Castelli 

and Paula Cooper that included the leading American minimal and conceptual artists. Along the way he encountered 

and practiced not only minimal and conceptual art but also performance, photography, poetry, music, choreography 

and theater design. He was audaciously experimental. Among friends he would practice entertaining 

magic tricks such as balancing a garbage can on his chin, a preview of his apparently innate and intuitive sense 

of balance that permitted him to make huge sculptures that appear magically balanced. It was his last act before 

deciding to start making art again. 

8 Bernar Venet, “L’Art conceptuel a dix ans,” artpress, n˚ 16, Paris, France, March 1978. 

Venet’s search for an irreducible image with a single reading that resisted interpretation lead to an exploration of 

lines, arcs and graphic signs in drawings and paintings that lead him to produce these signs in three dimensions 

and use them as building blocks for his sculptures. He began with black and white drawings, paintings and reliefs 

of graphs or charts of lines, arcs and angles, the basis of the sculptural style he was about to develop. The pared 

down black and white 1976 canvases looked like illustrations enlarged from the pages of a geometry text rather 

than paintings. By 1978, the measured black lines inscribed on canvas had become equally precise wood reliefs. 

In the succeeding sculptures based on the line, the arc and the angle, the mind completes what the eye sees. This 

tension between the perceptual and the conceptual has been a modern theme since Cezanne drew his multiple 

line incomplete contours. Venet’s concern with essences lead him to investigate the conundrum of what a potentially 

infinite three-dimensional line could be. 

Venet considers the open tubes in his 1966 conceptual piece his first three-dimensional lines. He continued this 

investigation of transforming the one-dimensional graphic symbol into two- and three-dimensional equivalents. 

This is a theme he picked up again in 1979 when he began to develop steel sculptures composed of two arcs and 

a series of wood reliefs that lead to the three-dimensional sculptures (1983). The elements of the sculptures were 

laid out on the floor of his studio to be organized by Venet following the linear scribbles he had previously enlarged 

into large metal wall reliefs he called “Indeterminate Areas”. 

When he made the transition from wood to steel, a new element entered his repertory: the “Indeterminate Line”. 

Defined as a linear form that departs from regularity according to no preconceived plan, but rather takes shape 

through the artist’s interaction with his material. The first three-dimensional lines were factory made metal rods 

that theoretically could be indefinitely extended. Extrapolated into three dimensions the graphic line becomes 

free and playful, antic and unpredictable, thus gaining in force what it loses in rationality. The three-dimensional 

line becomes dramatic expression of the space penetrated while avoiding the constraints of composition. The 

Indeterminate Lines are not mathematically defined but are variable depending on the artist’s decisions which 

incorporate chance and acknowledge the mathematical principle of indeterminacy. The various configurations of 

Indeterminate Lines Venet begun in the 1980s were made by bending and twisting long square rods of steel with 

an overhead crane. The coiled spiraling line bears the memory of the struggle between the artist and his obdurate 

material. 

As Carter Ratcliff was quick to perceive, Venet’s tactics were based on oppositions and contradictions, paradoxes 

that generated his forms: “This principle of opposition-sculpture against world, art against non-art, is so reliable 

that it is easy to overlook the oppositions within his oeuvre” he wrote. “Venet advances by going to extremes, one 

after the next, systematically.” Ratcliff also noted that many who knew him as a fabricator of large works in metal in 

the Eighties and Nineties forgot or never knew about his work as a conceptual artist in New York in the late Sixties. 

The Seventies were a period of transition and personal growth for Venet within the context of developments 

in New York. Among the most important of these developments was the possibility of creating large-scale 

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Saturation 2006 

30 x 4.75 m 

Installation: Galerie Philippe Séguin, Cour des Comptes, Paris, France 

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sculpture for public contexts. In 1967, the United States government began a program of art in public places. 

Barnett Newman was among the first artists selected to make a public sculpture. Having never done sculpture, 

Newman researched the possibilities for creating works on a large scale to be exhibited outdoors. The Broken 

Obelisk would be exhibited in front of the Seagram Building in New York City, in a manner that reflects Barnett 

Newman’s claim to “declare the space”. And indeed one can imagine that the vertical thrust as well as the use of 

cor-ten by Newman in his sculpture set an example for Venet. It was an example he could only fulfill, however, by 

integrating his life and art. 

A NEW LIFE AND NEW HORIZONS 

The artist should remain open and be opposed to sectarianism. Naturally, he or she should be aware of everything 

that has been conceived within art, but his or her main activity will be to leave the confines of art. The artist should 

take interest in the knowledge of others; have openness towards the outside world that will lead to an engagement 

in types of work assumed inconceivable before now. 

Bernar Venet. “Le contexte de l’art, l’art du contexte”, artpress, 1996 9 

Bernar Venet has consistently held that life is unpredictable. He could not for example predict that meeting a 

beautiful Parisian journalist after an opening in Nice in 1985 would radically alter the course of his life, opening up 

possibilities for expression and expansion as well as bringing a joie de vivre he had never previously experienced. 

Now he would divide his time between New York and Le Muy, in the countryside near Nice, where he bought a 

large property containing an old mill that was gradually converted into a home filled with art he had traded with the 

artists he admired. Both a large painting studio as well as a sculpture studio was added to Le Muy. 

Public commissions followed that permitted him to elaborate on a large scale his initial premises. Typical of the 

Indeterminate Lines is their relationship to the Asian ideogram or calligraphy. The “scribble” of the twisting and 

winding pieces has its analogies in handwriting and as divergent as it is from Picasso’s and David Smith’s geometric 

“drawing in space”, they nevertheless offer similar openings and transparency that are characteristic of 

modernism not found in traditional sculpture. Take for example the extraordinary and impressive 36-foot high Two 

Indeterminate Lines he created for La Défense in Paris in 1986 that rhythmically intertwine as if in a tango. 

The Indeterminate Line sculptures preserve the trace or evidence of the resistance of the steel to his will to bend it 

into eccentric and unpredictable knots and curves adds drama to our perception of the work as based on a given 

material or proposition that is altered by the artist’s human physical intervention. The new studio in Le Muy permitted 

Venet to expand his horizons and to work on an architectural scale that few sculptors, despite the dreams of 

Constructivists like Tatlin, have ever been able to realize. 

9 Siegelaub, Seth, “The Context of Art, Art in its Context”, originally published as “69/96 - Avant garde et fin de siècle - le contexte de l’art, l’art 

du contexte”, artpress, n˚ 17, Paris, France, 1996. 

88.5˚ Arc x 8 2012 

Cor-ten steel 

H: 27 meters 

Collection: Gibbs Farm, New Zealand 

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37.5˚ Arc 2010 

Cor-ten steel 

H: 38 meters 

Collection: Dongkuk Steel Co. Ltd, Seoul, South Korea 

He added to the vocabulary of the Indeterminate Lines the “Arcs”, segments of circles that first appear in his earliest 

drawings and paintings. In 1987 he initiated the series of monumental Arcs with the huge 60 x 120 foot Arc 

of 124.5˚ commissioned by the French government for the 750th anniversary of Berlin, which now occupies the 

Urianaplatz. Like the subsequent multiple arc sculptures, the work is titled in engraved block letters on the surface 

with the circumference, usually the number of degrees of the arc, which emphasizes their literal reference uniquely 

to themselves. That the inscribed title is a description of the segment of the circle that the arc represents indicates 

Venet’s insistence on specificity as a definition of the uniqueness of each work of art. 

Each of Venet’s Arcs is a segment of the circumference of a circle, a concept he explored earlier in drawings and 

paintings. Our knowledge that although the full circle is not present is related to the concept of the indeterminate 

line whose beginning and end are equally implied without being given. These mental projections from the physical 

work add to the complexity of our reaction which necessarily invokes an unknown, not present but implied projection. 

In the case of the precariously balanced Arcs we can project the circle from which they are derived, although 

their drama lies precisely in their projection of the non finito. 

Working within the parameters of the given, Venet pushes those boundaries to see how far they can be extended. 

The latest large-scale works are increasingly powerful and dense expressions of Venet’s chosen medium and 

basic forms, which he may now combine and recombine in a variety of permutations. Inevitably the relation to the 

landscape affects the structure of the sculpture. Hard steel contrasts with the soft green forms of nature just as 

the diagonals and loops of the Indeterminate Lines contradict the cubic volumes of adjacent buildings. The huge 

Arcs look as if they could be rocked thus projecting imminent movement. The towering unfinished vertical Arcs 

that the mind finishes represent a penetration of space that defies gravity. 

The progression from diagrams and formulas to the obdurate physicality of intractable heavy metal thrust the artist 

into unknown territories. The actions of chance, the gravity of materials, and the precariousness of equilibrium still 

concern him although now he is able to explore their interaction on a colossal scale. Chance determined heaps of 

lines are colossal versions of the original Heap of Coal. The looped skeins of the labyrinthine Indeterminate Lines 

that cannot be disentangled correspond to our own existential situation as we attempt to understand where the 

universe begins and ends. Thus in the end, Venet forgoes his initial rejection of metaphor, placing his work not in 

the realm of cold calculation but in that of the precarious and unpredictable human condition. Despite the cold 

calculations of his earlier work, Venet extrapolated his original mathematically based impersonal inexpressiveness 

into forms that have become—perhaps unintentionally—increasingly expressive. 

As his concepts developed and his technical skill as well as his means to make larger works improved, Venet’s 

Lines and Arcs became denser and increasingly monumental and imposing. However despite their explicit weightiness 

they are never passive or inert. The huge vertical arcs that lead the eye from earth to sky and back are also 

suggestive of human relationships which are totally at odds with Venet’s initial exclusively intellectual propositions. 

The reductivism of inexpressiveness is replaced by the complexity of a variable and suggestive expressiveness 

that, however, is not to be confused with the sentimentality and weltschmerz of expressionism. 

26 27





Venet’s sculptures have a directness and immediacy as well as a sense of scale when contrasted with their surrounding 

architecture that seems uncannily appropriate. Indeed, part of their allure is a sense that their precarious 

equilibrium is some kind of magic trick, the kind of surprise characteristic of his mercurial personality that we are 

provoked to understand and yet cannot quite grasp. The reason we cannot, however, is that behind their apparently 

simple presentations are decades of thought and experiment that permit the artist to create such astonishing 

forms. 

As his work progressed, Venet became increasingly aware of human inability to impose a predetermined order. 

This perception lead him to permit chance to play a role in his art. Thus he began a dialogue between the predetermined 

and the indeterminate. He started to incorporate principles of disorganization or randomness in recent 

works that in their compositional formlessness—lines, angles or arcs heaped at random—pick up the thread of 

indeterminacy announced the original Heap of Coal. 

Tracing the course of his career from the “action” of spilling the pile of coal on to the floor and photographing it 

as a work of art we see a strategy of oppositions and self-contradictions that challenge the conventional idea of 

stylistic evolution. However, as we review Venet’s career, we observe that his use of paradox is consistent in his 

work in both painting and sculpture. Thus paradox becomes a principle of continuity rather than of rupture. The 

problem then becomes how to reconcile the contradictions of paradox with the logic of coherence. 

Venet resolves this problem by depending on the logic of the conclusions he ultimately draws from his original 

theses. If these first principles appear self-contradictory or at odds with each other than the wresting of coherence 

from paradox becomes a constant struggle, as other elements such as accident and chance are incorporated into 

the system of thought. It is a problem that has perplexed logicians and philosophers since Socrates. 

In an effort to reconcile the contradictions of paradox into a coherent system Venet came across Kurt Gödel’s 

Theory of Incompleteness, which proved that any formal system that is rich enough to express arithmetic will have 

a proposition which is true yet cannot be proved, which is a paradox. Gödel showed that formal systems strong 

enough for arithmetic are either inconsistent or incomplete and that an inconsistent system is worthless since 

inconsistent systems allow contradictions. In the end Gödel concluded that even mathematics was clouded by 

subjectivity, leaving no grounds for distinguishing between the rational and the irrational. 

Gödel reasoned that although it is obvious that a line can be extended infinitely in both directions, no one has 

been able to prove it, which may be why Venet refers to his lines as “indeterminate” since they can begin or end 

wherever the eye decides is their projection. Gödel proved that there are always more things that are true than you 

can prove because any system of logic or numbers that mathematicians ever came up with will always rest on at 

least a few unprovable assumptions. Thus if incompleteness is true in math, it’s equally true in science or language 

and philosophy and art. Logic could not prove the existence or non-existence of God. 

Venet had never been convinced by the strict axioms of logical positivism, which maintained that anything you 

could not measure or prove was nonsense. He was far more comfortable with Gödel’s more elastic system in 

which faith and reason are not mutually exclusive. Within this system, even if science rests on an assumption that 

the universe is orderly, logical and mathematical based on fixed discoverable laws, you cannot prove it because of 

the subjectivity of the human observer. Therefore what you cannot prove you must take on faith based on experience. 

And it was precisely experiences, especially new experiences, that Venet always sought. 

FROM AXIOMATIC PROGRAMS TO THE FREEDOM OF DOUBT 

I work in doubt, far from the comfort of the assurance of habit. I paint shaped canvases which I can’t justify either. 

It is one kind of possible order… I follow my intuition and it seems to me that the result deserves to exist because 

of its difference and because I astonish myself. I don’t have one personality; I have several. I want to live change 

and to choose among all the possibilities that it seems to me deserve to exist. 

Bernar Venet, in conversation, 2010 

A visit to Venet’s studios in Le Muy is an opportunity to watch Venet in action like a whirling dervish, painting in 

the morning, working in the sculpture studio usually in the afternoon, arranging and rearranging the various linear 

elements until he is satisfied with the configuration. Currently Venet fabricates the elements of the Arcs, Angles 

and Indeterminate Lines in a foundry in Hungary. Once the steel elements are shaped they are brought to his factory 

near Le Muy in the Var region of southern France where he has one of his studios. (The other is in New York.) 

The Arcs are created by rolling cold steel into predetermined segments, although again he may and often will 

change the pieces once he has the elements in his studio. The three-dimensional Indeterminate Lines on the other 

hand begin as solid rods that he bends with clamps and tongs overhead cranes to twist them into unpremeditated 

configurations that inject them with spontaneity and a sense of motion once they are installed. Venet has 

described his relationship with his material as an interaction he sets into motion but cannot completely control. 

At every point the artist himself intervenes in the creation of the large-scale works, which is particularly evident in 

the series of Indeterminate Lines that are the opposite of mechanistic, bearing their traces of the struggle of the 

sculptor with his medium. 

Venet does not make preparatory drawings for his sculptures although he continues to make large drawings as 

well as paintings as a separate enterprise. There are maquettes for the later works and from smaller versions, 

but these are made after the fact or independently rather that to serve as models to be blown up. He sometimes 

creates different models choosing the one that best corresponds to the site, changing between the maquettes 

and the final work. 

28 29





219.5˚ Arc x 22 2006 

Cor-ten steel 

H: 360 cm, diam.: 430 cm; site-specific dimensions 

Collection: Capella Hotel, Singapore 

30 31





In the final decisions that decide the form of the sculptures, Venet literally wrestles with his materials. He considers 

this intimate physical relationship with tons of steel a game pitting the constraints of the metal against his will to form 

it. This physical struggle is at the heart of the Indeterminate Line sculptures. We feel the physicality of the wrestling 

match between the artist and his material as a drama of creation. The solid massive steel resists the artist’s wish to 

twist it. The resulting configuration corresponds now to no mathematical formula: it is as unpredictable and uncontrollable 

as life itself. Thus the artist who began determined to reduce his work to a single meaning may find that experience 

denies that possibility. The paradox of coherence is the result of an infinite form of ever evolving complexity. 

In 2000, wishing to attempt something new, Venet - probably inspired by the Sol LeWitt wall drawing that occupies 

a wall of his house - created a series of murals paintings. The mathematical equations that cover their 

monochrome surfaces are once borrowed from scientific works drawn in black on brightly colored grounds. These 

works were the subject of an article by Donald Kuspit in the New York Art Review that caught the attention of Karl 

Heinrich Hofmann, a professor of mathematics at the Technische Universität in Darmstadt, Germany. 

Hofmann perceived a relationship between Venet’s algebraic formulas to Commutative Diagrams 10 . “To a mathematician 

it appears that he is partly motivated by an artist’s desire to make the mathematicians’ infatuation with 

‘elegance’—certainly an aesthetic category—manifest for the layman” he observed. However, he was somewhat 

befuddled by the critic’s interpretation. According to Kuspit, “We are no longer afraid to be ignorant, for the color 

allows us to embrace our ignorance as the way to the emotional truth.” Kuspit saw mathematics as the alienness, 

an “entry into the emotional depths. What emotional truth? I suggest it is a sexual truth and depth… which at 

its deepest establishes an erotic relationship with the spectator. And which in itself re-enacts the sexual union of 

opposites. I suggest that Venet’s wall paintings do so, without showing its consummation. They are profoundly 

sexual in import, on a grand scale that masks their poignancy 11 .” 

Befuddled, the mathematician asks himself, “Could it be possible that I have missed out on something?” Not sharing 

the critics “orgiastic sentiments” he enjoyed the manner in which mathematical equations were presented in 

an aesthetic context. Hofmann remarks the deliberate repositioning and changes of scale of formulas from books 

that alters their function converting them into space defining marks aesthetically arranged. Now the signs used 

by mathematicians to communicate information are translated into jumbled typographical markings to fill space. 

“Mathematicians”, Hofmann noted, “are likely to react and respond immediately; outsiders are probably surprised 

if not stunned by the artist’s proposition that tokens of a highly specialized technical language are to be used as 

building blocks of a new artistic expression. The element of surprise is calculated. In Venet’s work, mathematical 

typography is recognized as its own graphical and architectural structure, utilized and elevated artistically in 

a twofold fashion: first, by the brilliant monochromatic backgrounds, and second, by the monumental format 12 .” 

10 Hofmann, Karl Heinrich, Notes of the American Mathematical Society, June/July 2002. 

11 Kuspit, Donald, “Bernar Venet’s Wall Paintings”, New York Arts Magazine, n˚ 9, New York, September 2003. 

12 Hofmann, Karl Heinrich, Notes of the American Mathematical Society, June/July 2002. 

The mural paintings were followed by the Saturation series, large-scale canvases that added another degree of 

complexity by altering the size and color of the equations on their monochrome fields. Finding pleasure in painting 

with materials that did require a physical struggle, Venet continues to paint. The most recent series is inspired by 

the gilded ceiling of the Cour des Comptes in Paris, a commission that Venet won in a competition. 

In making the “gold” paintings, Venet first decides on the dimensions and shapes of the works, as well as the texts 

and equations and their size and placement and paints the gold grounds himself, but admits he does not have the 

patience to apply them to the surface of the paintings, a task he leaves to assistants. He makes the paintings out 

of a desire for change in order to get away from routine when he does not have any strong new ideas for sculptures. 

“I take all liberties. I work from intuition which is complete opposed and contradictory to my mathematical 

works of the Sixties in which theory and logic were more important than the pleasure of painting.” 

Originally, as we have observed, Venet focused on the relationship between the theoretical, the material and the 

practical. He based his forms on those of Platonic geometry—the line, the angle and the curve – that he ultimately 

extended to a point where they suggested the infinite. Their concreteness and actuality however maintained 

specificity so that they invoked neither Kandinsky’s spiritual dimensions nor Mondrian’s equally transcendental 

associations with the purity of the geometric. 

Despite the cold calculations of his earlier work, Venet extrapolated his original mathematically based impersonal 

inexpressiveness into forms that have become—perhaps unintentionally—increasingly expressive. These new 

gold ground paintings have no theoretical explanation, nor does Venet search for one, feeling his new liberty is a 

hard won prize. He does not justify the eccentric shapes of the canvases, considering them just one kind of possible 

order that permits him to cut off the texts in unexpected and unpredictable ways. 

“After painting the saturations of numerous colors”, he explains, “Today my ideal solution is a ‘non color’ which 

at the same time is the ideal background like those of the religious paintings of Cimabue. Besides which my first 

paintings were blue, red and the green of the paintings of Cimabue on gold grounds. As a very young artist in 

1959 and 1960 I painted religious paintings with gold grounds. At the time I rejected color as much as possible 13 .” 

In the current series Venet delights in the artificiality of gold since it is a color not found in nature. He explains his 

attraction to gold on the basis that gold is not a natural but a cultural color associated with religious paintings 

and architectural embellishment. And of course the imagery of mathematics is not that of religious iconography. 

Despite the whirl of professional activity at Le Muy, because it is in a pastoral setting, there is a great quiet and a 

possibility for contemplation listening to the waterfall outside the ancient mill. The library is full of books Venet is 

constantly consulting and it is not surprising to find that above his bed in the place where a crucifix would normally 

be hung is the text of Gödel’s Theory of Incompleteness. 

13 Venet, in conversation with the author, 2010. 

32 33





top left: 

Effondrement: 225.5˚ Arc x 11 2011 

Cor-ten steel 

Diam.: 500 cm; site-specific dimensions 

bottom left: 

Four Indeterminate Lines 2011 

Rolled steel 

270 x 550 x 320 cm 

219.5˚ Arc x 28 2011 

Cor-ten steel 

H: 400 cm; diam.: 500 cm; site-specific dimensions 

Exhibition: Château de Versailles, France, 2011 

34 35





85.8˚ Arc x 16 2011 

Cor-ten steel 

H: 22 meters 

Exhibition: Place d’Armes, Château de Versailles, 

France, 2011 

36 37


Wall reliefs, 1978-1979, graphite on wood 

Exhibition: Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg, Germany, 2007 

39





Position of Four Right Angles 1979 

Graphite on wood 

Diam.: 210 cm; depth: 5.5-6 cm; dimensions may vary 

Position of Two Major Arcs of 287.5˚ Each 1979 


Diam.: 210 cm; depth: 5.5-6 cm; dimensions may vary 

40 41





Indeterminate Line 1981 


189 x 189 cm 

42 

43





Indeterminate Line 1984 


177 x 195 cm 

44 45





Installation of GRIBS in the artist’s studio, 2011 

46 47





GRIB 5 2011 


236 x 150 x 3.5 cm 

GRIB 1 2011 


225 x 215 x 3.5 cm 

48 49





GRIB 1 2011 


225 x 215 x 3.5 cm 

GRIB 1 2011 


245 x 310 x 3.5 cm 

50 51





Foreground: Six Leaning Straight Lines 2009-2012, cor-ten steel, H: 185 cm; L: 12 meters 

Background: GRIB 2 2011, torch-cut waxed steel, 239 x 277 x 3.5 cm - GRIB 2 2011, torch-cut waxed steel, 246 x 240 x 3.5 cm 


52 53





GRIB 3 2011 


238 x 410 x 3.5 cm 

54 55





Installation of GRIBS in the artist’s studio, 2011 

56 57





GRIBS, 2011, torch-cut waxed steel 


58 59





GRIB 1 2012 


248 x 146 x 3.5 cm 

GRIB 1 2012 


249 x 150 x 3.5 cm 

60 61





GRIB 4 2011 


233 x 461 x 3.5 cm 

62 63





Saturations, 2006-2011, acrylic on canvas 

Exhibition: Retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mücsarnok, Budapest, Hungary, 2012 

64 65





Saturation with a Large Bracket 2006 


200 x 200 cm 

66 67





Gold Saturation with Four Blue Arrows 2008 


200 x 200 cm 

68 69





Gold Saturation with four Q 2008 


200 x 200 cm 

70 71





Saturations, 2010-2011, Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 80 cm, each 

Exhibition: L’oeuvre peinte, Hôtel des Arts, Toulon, France, 2011 

72 73





Gold Saturation with Horizontal Arrow 2011 


80 x 80 cm 

Copper painting with ‘the’ in the upper left corner 2010 


80 x 80 cm 

74 75





Copper painting with ‘Phi and two 2 2010 


80 x 80 cm 

Gold saturation painting with ‘three integrals’ 2010 


80 x 80 cm 

76 77





Gold saturation with a big 3 2011 


80 x 80 cm 

Copper painting with ‘Sum W 2’ 2010 


80 x 80 cm 

78 79





Copper painting with four ‘sums’ 2010 


80 x 80 cm 

Gold saturation painting with ‘a probability densi...’ 2010 


80 x 80 cm 

80 81





Red and Gold with member function 2009 


180.5 x 211.5 cm 

82 83





Square Gold with 4 Triangles 2009 


186.5 x 186.5 cm 

84 85





Peintures or en 4 parties avec ‘contient’ en haut à gauche 2009 

[Gold Painting in 4 parts with ‘contient’ on the upper left] 


213.5 x 333 cm 

86 87





Gold Saturation with ‘we determine finitely’ 2009 


Diam.: 247 cm 

88 89





Double Leaning Gold 2010 


214 x 313.5 cm 

90 91





Gold Saturation with 2 on the upper right 2012 


182 x 182 cm 

92 93





Pearl Saturation with NN 2008 


182 x 182 cm 

94 95





Round Saturation (Gold) with 23 on Top 2011 


Diam.: 214.5 cm 

96 97


1941 Born on April 20 in Château-Arnoux, France. 

1958 Studies for one year at the Villa Thiole, the municipal art school of the city of Nice. 

1959 Employed as a stage designer for the Nice City Opera. 

1964 Participates in the Salon comparaisons at the Museum of Modern Art, Paris. 

1966 Creates a ballet, Graduation, to be danced on a vertical plane. Starts making new work based on 

the use of mathematical diagrams. 

1971 Bernar Venet decides, for theoretical reasons, to cease his artistic activities. 

1974 Teaches “Art and Art Theory” at the Sorbonne, Paris. A representative for France at the XIIIth São 

Paulo Biennale, Brazil. 

1976 Starts creating artistic work again. 

1977 Exhibits at Documenta VI, Kassel, Germany. 

1978 Participates in the exhibition “From Nature to Art. From Art to Nature” at the Venice Biennale, Italy. 

1979 Awarded a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, Washington, DC. 

1984 Starts creating his sculptures at Atelier Marioni, a foundry in the Vosges region of France. 

1988 Jean-Louis Martinoty asks Bernar Venet to stage his ballet Graduation (conceived in 1966) at the 

Paris Opéra. The artist is the author of the music, choreography, set designs and costumes. 

Received the 1988 Design Award for his sculpture in front of the World Trade Center in Norfolk, 

Virginia. 

1989 Awarded the Grand Prix des Arts de la Ville de Paris. 

1991 Creates several musical compositions including Sound and Resonance at the Studio Miraval, Var, 

France. Release of two compact discs on the Circé-Paris label, Gravier/Goudron, 1963, and Acier 

roulé E 24-2, 1990. 

1993 Invited to participate in the artists’ film festival in Montreal, Canada for his film Rolled Steel XC-10. 

1994 Mr. Jacques Chirac, then the Mayor of Paris, invites Venet to present twelve sculptures from his 

Indeterminate Line series on the Champ de Mars. This exhibition kicks off a world tour of Venet’s 

sculptures. 

1996 Awarded the honor of “Commandeur dans l’ordre des Arts et Lettres” by the Minister of Culture in 

France. Presentation of the film Lines, directed by Thierry Spitzer, which covers the artist’s complete 

œuvre. 

1997 Moves to a studio in Chelsea, New York City. Begins a new series of sculptures entitled Arcs x 4 and 

Arcs x 5. Becomes a Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, based in Salzburg, 

Austria. 

1998 Travels to China. Invited by the Mayor of Shanghai to participate in the Shanghai International Sculpture 

Symposium. 

1999 Installation of a public sculpture in the city of Cologne, Germany in honor of the G-8 Summit. 

Releases the third version of the film Tarmacadam (from 1963) with Arkadin Productions. 

Exhibits at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva. 

Publishes a compilation of his poetry, Apoétiques 1967-1998. 

2000 Exhibits a new series of wall paintings, Major Equations, at central art museums in Rio de Janeiro 

and Saõ Paulo, Brazil; Cajarc, France and at MAMCO in Geneva. 

A year of important publications: Bernar Venet 1961-1970, a monograph about the young artist by 

99





2000 Robert Morgan; Sursaturation, an original work about reflections on the possibilities of literature; 

Bernar Venet: Sculptures & Reliefs, written by Arnauld Pierre; La Conversion du regard, with texts 

and interviews from 1975-2000; Global Diagonals. 

2001 Éditions Assouline publishes Furniture, with a text by Claude Lorent in conjunction with exhibitions 

at the Galerie Rabouan Moussion and at SM’ART (Salon du mobilier et de l’objet design), both in 

Paris. 

Poetry reading at White Box in New York with Robert Morgan. 

Inauguration of the Chapelle Saint-Jean in Château-Arnoux. The stained glass windows and all the 

furniture are designed by Bernar Venet. 

Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont in Paris exhibits new series of Equation paintings. 

2002 A performance-evening incorporating the artist’s poetry, film and music at the Centre Georges Pompidou, 

Paris, France. 

Exhibits Indeterminate Line sculptures at the Galerie Academia in Salzburg, Austria, and at Robert 

Miller Gallery in New York. 

Monograph by Thomas McEvilley on the artist’s complete body of work published in French and 

German, and a year later in English. 

Exhibits Equation and new Saturation paintings at Anthony Grant, Inc., New York. 

Traveling sculpture show arrives in the United States. The Fields at Art Omi International Sculpture 

Park in New York State inaugurates a program of personal exhibitions presenting twelve of the 

artist’s sculptures, covering all variations on the theme of the line. The show moves to the Atlantic 

Center for the Arts in Florida in November. 

2003 Seventeen solo exhibitions this year, including a retrospective of his early work from 1961-1963 at 

the Hotel des Arts, Toulon, France, and Autoportrait at the Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain 

(MAMAC) in Nice, France. 

Exhibits Saturation paintings in France, California and at the Art Basel Miami Beach Fair. 

L’Yeuse, Paris publishes first book on Equation paintings, written by Donald Kuspit. 

Traveling sculpture show makes its way through Europe: in Nice, France; the city of Luxembourg; 

Bad Homburg, Germany; Schloss Herberstein, Austria; and in the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris. 

2004 Three simultaneous solo exhibitions at locations in New York City, notably the Robert Miller Gallery 

as well as three large-scale sculptures on the Park Avenue Malls. 

Publication of Art: A Matter of Context, a book of the artist’s writings and interviews spanning 1975- 

2003. 

Traveling sculpture show makes its way to: the city of Liège, Belgium; Miami, Florida; and Denver, 

Colorado. 

A year of important commissions for: Bosch Collection in Stuttgart, Germany; AGF, Paris, France; 

and the Colorado Convention Center, in Denver. 

Retrospective of the artist’s Arcs exhibited at the Musée Sainte-Croix of Poitiers, France. Related 

survey, L’hypothèse de l’arc, is published a year later. 

2005 On January 1, the artist is named “Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur”, France’s highest decoration. 

His sculptures continue to tour Europe and North America, with exhibitions in Boulogne-Billancourt 

and Cergy-Pontoise in France; at the Galerie Guy Pieters Knokke-le Zoute, Belgium; the Evo Gallery 

in New Mexico; and the Carrie Secrist in Chicago, Illinois. 

2006 Receives the Robert Jacobsen prize for sculpture from the Würth Stiftung in Germany. Chosen by 

the jury at the Ministry of Culture in Paris to paint the ceiling of the Palais Cambon of the Cour des 

Comptes in Paris, in celebration of the establishment’s bicentennial in 2007. 

2007 Inauguration of Saturation on the ceiling of the Cour des Comptes in Paris by President Jacques 

Chirac. Three retrospective exhibitions: at the National Museum of Contemporary Art near Seoul, 

South Korea; the Busan Museum of Modern Art in Busan, South Korea; and the Museum Küppersmühle 

für Moderne Kunst in Duisburg, Germany. Traveling sculpture show moves to the French 

cities of Bordeaux and Metz. June sees the inauguration of 25 meter Arcs commissioned for the 

Toulouse Métro. 

2008 Sotheby’s for the first time invites a single artist – Bernar Venet – to present his work on the grounds 

of the Isleworth Country Club. From January through April 2008, approximately twenty-five monumental 

sculptures showcase the artist’s work of the last two decades, highlighting some of his 

most distinctive themes. In the fall, the city of San Diego hosts a dozen of the artist’s sculptures in 

California. 

2009 L’Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux stages the first public exhibition of artwork from the 

Venet Family Collection. The Arsenale Novissimo grants him 1,200 m 2 of space in the 53rd Venice 

Biennale to exhibit four new monumental sculptures. A survey of paintings and sculptures is 

mounted at the Kunsthalle Darmstadt in Germany, then moves to the Palais des Beaux Arts (BO- 

ZAR) in Brussels, supplemented by an exhibition of new “Shaped Canvases” at the Galerie Guy 

Pieters in Knokke-Heist, Belgium. 

2010 Valencia’s IVAM mounts a retrospective of Venet’s conceptual work as well as a full survey of his 

paintings under the curatorship of Barbara Rose. The Texan-French Alliance of the Arts and Mc- 

Clain Gallery lead the charge of bringing Public Art to Houston, in the form of 10 large-scale sculptures 

by Venet installed in Hermann Park. The Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur organizes for a group 

of sculptures in Salzburg, Austria. President Nicolas Sarkozy inaugurates a monumental sculpture 

on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice in honor of the 150 th anniversary of the city’s reunification 

with France. Two commissions in Seoul, Korea for Dongkuk Steel Mill and Hannam The Hill. 

2011 Mounts a painting retrospective at the Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea, and the Hôtel des Arts, 

Toulon. Exhibits seven monumental sculptures on the grounds of the Château de Versailles, and 

the Château de Marly in France, including Arcs of 22 meters framing the statue of Louis XIV at the 

palace entrance. A film, “Venet / Sculptures” is produced by Thierry Spitzer on the occasion of 

Venet à Versailles. 

Exhibits sculptures at the Salinger Foundation in Le Thor and in the city of Valenciennes, France, as 

well as in Frankfurt, Germany, and sees the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz present his drawings on 

the occasion of the acquisition of a sculpture for their permanent collection. Develops his work on 

steel wall reliefs (“GRIBS”), which he inaugurates at the Von Bartha Garage in Basel, Switzerland. 

2012 Stages a retrospective at the Müscarnok Museum in Budapest, Hungary. March sees the inauguration 

of 88.5° Arc x 8, a 27-meter tall sculpture on Gibbs Farm near Auckland, New Zealand, and 

the announcement by Valencia’s IVAM that Venet will be the 2013 recipient of the International Julio 

González Sculpture Prize. A biographical note on Bernar Venet is included in the 2012 Edition of 

the Dictionnaire Larousse, which will be available to the public starting June 2012. 

Selected Solo Exhibitions 

1964 Galerie Ursula Girardon, Paris, France 

1966 Galerie Jacques Matarasso, Nice, France 

1968 Judson Church Theater, Relativity’s Track (performance), New York 

1969 Newark College of Engineering, Newark, New Jersey 

1970 Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany 

Kunsthaus, Hamburg, Germany 

1971 Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France 

New York Cultural Center (Retrospective), New York 

1974 Galerie Daniel Templon, Milan, Italy 

1975 XIIIth Biennale, São Paulo, Brazil 

Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 

Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Great Britain 

1976 La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California 

1977 Bruno Bischofberger Gallery, Zürich, Switzerland 

Musée d’Art et d’industie, Saint-Étienne, France 

Sonja Hennie - Niels Onstad Foundation, Hovikodden, Norway 

1979 ARCO Center for Visual Arts, Los Angeles, California 

1984 Musée Sainte-Croix, Poitiers, France 

Musée d’Art Moderne, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France 

1985 Musée Départemental des Vosges, Épinal, France 

1986 Leo Castelli Gallery Uptown, New York 

1987 Galerie Pierre Huber, Geneva, Switzerland 

Quadrat Museum - Moderna Gallery, Bottrop, Germany 

100 101





Shaped Canvases, 2009-2011, acrylic on canvas 

Exhibition: Seoul Museum of Art (SOMA), Seoul, South Korea, 2011 

102 103





1989 Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany 

Ronald Greenberg Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri 

1990 Galerie Daniel Templon, La ligne à vif (performance), Paris, France 

Leo Castelli Gallery Uptown, New York 

Galerie Pierre Huber, Geneva, Switzerland 

1991 Fred Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, California 

Galeria Theo, Barcelona, Spain 

1992 Person’s Weekend Museum, Tokyo, Japan 

1993 Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France 

Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany 

André Emmerich Gallery, New York 

1994 Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Bogotá, Colombia 

Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea 

Hyundai Gallery, Seoul, South Korea 

Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Florida 

1995 Hong Kong Museum of Art, Kowloon, Hong Kong 

Shanghai Museum of Art, Shanghai, China 

Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris FIAC, France 

1996 Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris, France 

Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne, Germany 

1997 Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble, France 

Le Nouveau Musée / Institut de Villeurbanne, Lyon, France 

Musée du Québec, Québec, Canada 

Hyundai Gallery, Seoul, South Korea 

1998 Musée d’Art Moderne de St. Étienne, St. Étienne, France 

Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia, Italy 

Galleria Karsten Greve, Milan, Italy 

1999 Centro Cultural de Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina 

Museum of Modern Art Mücsarnok, Budapest, Hungary 

Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva, Switzerland 

2000 Eaton Fine Art, West Palm Beach, Florida 

Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janiero, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 

Centre d’Art Contemporain Georges Pompidou, Cajarc, France 

Teatro Nacional de Brasília, Brazil 

Museu Brasileiro da Escultura, São Paulo, Brazil 

Galerie Kaj Forsblom, Helsinki, Finland 

2001 Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris, France 

Furniture, Galerie Rabouan Moussion, Paris, France 

Galerie Haas & Fuchs, Berlin, Germany 

Galerie Hans Mayer, Berlin, Germany 

2002 Galerie Academia, Salzburg, Austria 

Conjugaisons et divorces de la voix, de l’image et de l’écriture, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France 

Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany 

Robert Miller Gallery, New York 

Grant, Selwyn Fine Art, New York 

2003 Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain (MAMAC), Nice, France 

Equation/Saturation, MAMAC / Galerie des Ponchettes, Nice, France 

1961-1963, Hôtel des Arts, Toulon, France 

Bernar Venet aux Tuileries, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France 

Galerie Scheffel, Bad Homburg, Allemagne 

2004 Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris, France 

Galerie Haas & Fuchs, Berlin, Germany 

Sculptures on Park Avenue, New York 

Robert Miller Gallery, New York 

Musée Sainte-Croix, Poitiers, France 

2005 Musée de l’Arles et de la Provence antiques, Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France 

Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 

Sculptures in the Loop, Chicago, Illinois 

2006 Gary Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand 

Museum / Kunsthalle Würth, Künzelsau, Germany 

William Shearburn Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri 

2007 National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwangmyeong-gil (Seoul), South Korea 

Bernar Venet in Bordeaux, France 

Bernar Venet in Metz, France 

Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg, Germany 

Busan Museum of Art, Busan, South Korea 

2008 Bernar Venet: Sotheby’s at Isleworth, Windermere, Florida 

Galerie von Bartha, S-Chanf, Switzerland 

2009 Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany 

Le Palais des Beaux-Arts (BOZAR), Brussels, Belgium 

Arsenale Novissimo, 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy 

2010 Bernar Venet in Hermann Park, Houston, Texas 

Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Valencia, Spain, curated by Barbara Rose 

Le monde de Bernar Venet, Venet in Context, Musée Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France 

2011 Seoul Museum of Art (SOMA), Seoul, South Korea 

Ludwig Museum im Deutschherrenhaus, Koblenz, Germany 

Venet à Versailles, Château de Versailles, Château de Marly, France 

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes, France 

Bernar Venet in Frankfurt, Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany 

Hôtel des Arts, Toulon, France 

Von Bartha Garage, Basel, Switzerland 

2012 Mücsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary 

Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand 

Bernar Venet: Monumental Sculptures, Le French May, Hong Kong 

de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong 

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki, Finland 

Public Collections 

Akron Art Institute, Akron, Ohio, USA 

Atlantic Richfield Corporation, Los Angeles, California 

Bank Audi, Beirut, Lebanon 

Busan Museum of Art, Busan, South Korea 

Citibank Corporation, New York, New York, USA 

City of Metz, France 

City of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 

Colonnade III Plaza, MEPC & Equity Properties, Dallas, Texas, USA 

Contemporary Art Center, San Diego, California, USA 

DaimlerChrysler Collection, Stuttgart, Germany 

Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, USA 

Espace de l’Art Concret, Mouans-Sartoux, France 

Esplanade de Uni Mail, Geneva, Switzerland 

Esquire Company, Seoul, Korea 

First National Bank, Seattle, Washington 

Fonds d’Art Contemporain des Musées de Nice, Nice, France 

Fondation Clément, Le François, Martinique 

Fondation Looser, Zürich, Switzerland 

Fondation Mourtala, Dakar, Senegal 

Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, Switzerland 

Foundation Domnick, Nürtingen, Germany 

104 105





Three Indeterminate Lines 1994 

Rolled steel 

273 x 300 x 430 cm 

Exhibition: Champs de Mars, Paris, France, 1994 

106 107





108 

Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA 

Gateway Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri, USA 

Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia, USA 

He Xiangning Art Gallery, Shenzhen, China 

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., USA 

Ho-Am Art Museum, Seoul, Korea 

Hood Museum of Art Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA 

Ilshin Spinning Company, Seoul, Korea 

Ilwoo Foundation, Jeju Island, Korea 

Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Valencia, Spain 

Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia, Bamberg, Germany 

Jumex Foundation, Mexico City, Mexico 

Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Germany 

Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France 

Ludwig Museum im Deutschherrenhaus, Koblenz, Germany 

Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris, France 

McCrory Corporation Collection, New York, New York, USA 

Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA 

MIT Permanent Collection, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 

Musée d’Art contemporain de Dunkerque, Dunkirk, France 

Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, Switzerland 

Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland 

Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain, Nice, France 

Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain, Saint Étienne, France 

Musée de Peinture et de Sculpture, Grenoble, France 

Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, France 

Musée du Québec, Québec, Canada 

Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France 

Musée national d’art moderne de Liège, Liège, Belgium 

Musée Sainte-Croix, Poitiers, France 

Musées Royaux de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium 

Museum im Kulturspeicher, Würzburg, Germany 

Museum of Art, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA 

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, USA 

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, USA 

Museum Sztuky W. Lodzi, Lodz, Poland 

Museum / Kunsthalle Würth, Künzelsau, Germany 

National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (Gwangmyeong-gil), South Korea 

National Museum of Jakarta, Jakarta, Indonesia 

Neue Galerie im Alten Kurhaus, Aachen, Germany 

North Fork Bank Collection, Melville, New York, USA 

Parc de la Boverie, Liège, Belgium 

Person’s Weekend Museum, Tokyo, Japan 

Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida, USA 

Quadrat Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany 

Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea 

Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, USA 

Sara Hilden Art Museum, Tampere, Finland 

Seoul Museum of Art (SOMA), Seoul, South Korea 

Seoul Olympic Museum, Seoul, South Korea 

Smalley Sculpture Garden, University of Judaism, Los Angeles, California, USA 

Sonja Henie - Niels Onstad Foundations, Hovikodden, Norway 

Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Kyongbuk, Korea 

The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, Arkansas, USA 

The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, USA 

The Fields Sculpture Park, Omi International Arts Center, Ghent, New York, USA 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, USA 

Commissions 

The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA 

The New York University Art Collection, New York, New York, USA 

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York, USA 

Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea 

Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, USA 

Von der Heydt Museum, Wüppertal, Germany 

Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut, USA 

Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany 

Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA 

Yuanta Financial Holdings, Taipei, Taiwan 

Archon Company, Austin, Texas, USA 

Bank Al Maghrib, Agadir, Morocco 

Beijing Silver Tower Real Estate Development Company, Beijing, China 

Centre Hospitalier de Cannes, Cannes, France 

City of Adachi, Tokyo, Japan 

City of Belley, France 

City of Bergen, Norway 

City of Cologne, Germany 

City of Denver (Colorado Convention Center), Denver, Colorado, USA 

City of Epinal, France 

City of Lille, France 

City of Shenzhen, China 

Collège & École de Commerce Emilie-Gourd, Geneva, Switzerland 

Dongkuk Steel Mill Company, Seoul, South Korea 

Espace Fortant de France, Sète, France 

Gallery Hannam The Hill, Seoul, South Korea 

Goodman Segar Hogan, The World Trade Center, Norfolk, Virginia 

Groupe AGF, Paris, France 

Hansol Company, Seoul, Korea 

Jardin Albert 1er, Nice, France 

Kurpark, Bad Hamburg, Germany 

La Chapelle Saint Jean, Chateaux-Arnoux, France 

La Cour des Comptes, Paris, France 

La Défense, Paris, France 

Miyagi Prefectural Library, Sendai, Japan 

Place de Bordeaux, Strasbourg, France 

Place Sulzer, Nice, France 

Quai des Etats-Unis, Nice, France 

Rocher de Roquebrune, Roquebrune sur Argens, France 

Runnymeade Sculpture Farm, San Francisco, California, USA 

Société du Métro de l’Agglomération Toulousaine, Toulouse, France 

TCLM Mansons Development, Auckland, New Zealand 

Urania Platz, Berlin, Germany 

109


Author 

Barbara Rose 

Conception and Coordination 

Jacki Mansfield 

Carole de Senarclens 

Frédéric de Senarclens 

Vijaya Krishnan 

Sophie Hirabayashi 

Chanez Baali 

Audrey Collins 

Laszlo Szalai 

Olivier Philibert 

Maxime Bruyelle 

Graphic Design 

mostra-design.com 

Photo Credits 

Philippe Bompuis, Nice - p. 8 

Jérôme Cavalière, Marseille / Archives Bernar Venet, New York - p. 26, 102-103 

Philippe Chancel, Paris - pp. 34-35 

Courtesy of Capella, Singapore - pp. 30-31 

Alexandre Devals, Paris / Archives Bernar Venet, New York - Front Cover, p. 8-11, 40-41, 52-53, 58-59, 64-65 

Werner Hannapel, Essen - p. 39 

Craig Johnston, New York - pp. 18-19 

Gauls, Koblenz - pp. 20-21 

Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland - pp. 48, 50, 54-55 

Jean-Christophe Lett, Marseille - pp. 72-73, 82-83, 85-87, 90-91 

LuxProductions, Paris - p. 23 

Jean-Marie del Moral, Paris - p. 107 

De Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong - p.89 

Archives Bernar Venet, New York - Back Cover, pp. 9, 12-13, 15-16, 25, 36-37, 43, 45-47, 49, 51, 56-57, 

60-63, 67, 69, 71, 74-81, 93, 95, 97 

Andreas Zimmermann, Basel - p. 5 

Printed in Singapore 

Dominie Press Pte Ltd 

Edition of 1’000 copies 

Published in 2012 

© the artist and the author 

ISBN 978-981-07-3647-7 

111

38 Armenian Street 

Singapore 179 942 

T +65 6636 8360 

F +65 6636 8361 

info@artpluralgallery.com 

www.artpluralgallery.com 

Opening hours from 11 am to 7 pm 

Closed on Sundays and Public Holidays

Bernar Venet - Art Plural Gallery

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