Diplomatic World 67

BERNAR VENET RETROSPECTIVE
60 YEARS OF SCULPTURE
PAINTING & PERFORMANCE
1961-2021
Kunsthalle Berlin – Tempelhof Airport
“Bernar Venet Retrospective, 60 Years of Sculpture, Painting &
Performance, 1961-2021” is the internationally-renowned French
artist’s largest and most comprehensive retrospective in the
world to date, spanning the entirety of his complex and widely
diverse oeuvre as a sculptor, painter, performance artist – and
radical conceptual artist. The exhibition will bring together over
150 works, reflecting the artist’s uncompromising approach and
natural obsession for constantly shaping his environment through
his art. On view from January 29 – May 30, 2022, the show is the
first in a series of exhibitions to unfold over the next two years in
the Kunsthalle Berlin across the spectacular hangars 2 and 3 of
Berlin’s emblematic Tempelhof Airport.
Organized by the Stiftung für Kunst and Kultur, curated by Walter
Smerling, Bernar Venet, 1961—2021 charts the trajectory of the
artist’s career from his very beginnings in his studio, which was
made available to him by the French army during his military service,
and which form the cornerstone of a body of work that has
repeatedly called itself into question. Venet has consistently affirmed
his concept of art as an attitude which extends far beyond
the formal and the spatial. His aspirations to this day are firmly
rooted in the unbounded desire to simply never accept the world
as it is, instead lending it his own perspective. Landscapes and
spaces suddenly assume a new dimension, allowing the observer
to differently view – and feel – the energetically charged space
in which his signature steel lines, arcs and angles are installed.
The exhibition is a personal homage to Dr. Paul Wember, as
Venet pays tribute to the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum
in Krefeld – the very first to grant the artist a solo exhibition in
1970 at a time when no gallery had shown his work outside of
group exhibitions.
One of the exhibition’s focuses is Venet’s work from 1966 to
1970 – his conceptual years in the United States – revealing
the extreme radicality of an artistic approach which gave him
international recognition at a very young age. Since 1979, and
the fabrication of his Indeterminate Lines, his work has taken
a turn towards the formalist. In addition to his wood reliefs, he
has developed a unique steel sculpture style which can be seen
today in capitals across the continents. For the show, Venet will
use the sculptural elements of his large-scale installation at the
Louvre Lens (France) to specially conceive four different installations
made of Arcs, Angles and Straight Lines unfolding across
Tempelhof Airport’s spacious, yet seldom invested warehouses.
In tandem with his sculptural work, the exhibition expands
Venet’s complete painting work, from his first 1961 Goudron
(Tar) paintings to his most recent, Equations and Saturations, the
textual and mathematical symbols of which become the defining
elements over richly coloured backgrounds. With these paintings,
Venet rejects formalism as much as the idea of abstraction.
While abstract art commonly refers to what is non-figurative,
these new works function within another category. By presenting
what are usually defined as “mathematical objects” (numbers,
figures, spaces, functions, relations, structures), the works attain
a maximum level of abstraction: the non-referential is pushed to
its extreme limits. In sum, contrasting it to abstract art where a
symbolism of form or colour is implied, Venet offers a maximal
self-referential system, which only a mathematical equation can
offer.
Throughout the course of exhibition Venet will activate the space
with on-site performances, including Domino Effondrement,
first performed in 2021 as part of the Venet Foundation’s annual
exhibition (Le Muy, France), in which he uses a forklift to trigger
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