Bernar Venet

Bernar Venet was born in 1941 in Château-Arnoux, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence region of southern France. He studied at the Villa Thiole in Nice in 1958 before relocating to New York in 1966, where he became a significant presence within the emerging conceptual art scene. He now lives and works in Le Muy, in the Var department of France. Over more than six decades, his practice has moved fluidly across sculpture, painting, performance, and conceptual systems, consistently anchored by a rigorous engagement with mathematics, geometry, and the logic of physical forces.

Venet's earliest work announced an uncompromising rejection of painterly convention. His Tar Paintings of the early 1960s introduced industrial materials into the pictorial field, while his Pile of Coal surrendered compositional control entirely to gravity — a gesture that placed him in dialogue with Arte Povera and process art before either term had fully crystallized. From 1966 to 1976, he pursued a landmark conceptual body of work incorporating mathematical formulae, astrophysical diagrams, and scientific texts into paintings, drawings, and documents — a period MAMAC has described as initiating an artistic revolution. Works from this phase entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Musée national d'Art moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, institutions that remain among the more than eighteen public collections worldwide holding his work, alongside MOCA Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, MAMCO Geneva, and the Musées Royaux de Belgique in Brussels, among others. From the late 1970s onward, Venet developed the monumental steel sculptures — Arcs and Angles and Indeterminate Lines — that have defined his international presence in public space and major sculpture parks. More recently, his exhibition When Steel Dreams of Code at Waddington Custot in London in 2025 marked a significant expansion into algorithmic and generative art, extending his long-standing preoccupation with mathematical systems into new computational territory.

The scope of his exhibition history reflects both the breadth of his geographic reach and the sustained institutional interest in his work. Solo presentations in recent years have included L'hypothèse de la gravité at the Musée du Louvre-Lens in 2021, a 60-year retrospective at Kunsthalle Berlin at Tempelhof Airport in 2022, Diffeomorphism and Discontinuity at Perrotin in Paris in 2023, and a solo presentation at the Biennale de Venise in 2024. Earlier milestones include Sculptures monumentales at the Château de Versailles in 2011 and a retrospective spanning 1959 to 2019 at the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon. His primary gallery representation is held by Perrotin, Ceysson & Bénétière, and Waddington Custot, with additional exhibition relationships across galleries in New York, London, Stockholm, Hong Kong, Auckland, and beyond. Among the honors recognizing his career are the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016, the Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur awarded by the French state in 2005, the Commandeur dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres conferred by the French Ministry of Culture in 1996, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979.