BERNAR VENET EXHIBITION

"The years conceptual 1966-1976"

October 12, 2018 - January 13, 2019

MAMAC - Nice

12 October 2018 to January 13, 2019, the city of Nice invites you to discover the special exhibition "Bernar Venet. The conceptual years 1966-1976"at the MAMAC.

"By presenting what is usually defined as"mathematical objects": numbers, figures, spaces, functions, relationships, structures, etc... the artwork can then rise to a level of maximum abstraction that was alien to him." The "sealing" is pushed to its extreme limits. We have more, as in abstract art, symbolism either, the shape or the color for example... I propose a maximum self-referential system, one that only a mathematical equation holds. »

By the 1960s, Bernar Venet undertook a radicalisation of artistic experience and aesthetic production unprecedented. Put off by the conventions out of french art, fascinated by the American formalism and, above all, Marcel Duchamp, he imposed, from 1970, as one of the leaders of conceptual art.

The exhibition proposes for the first time to explore this period insufficiently known of his work, which began in Nice to find its deployment in the United States.

Conceptual, sculptural and pictorial, the work of Bernar Venet then develops in the direction of a reflection on the identity of the art and the relationship between artistic expression and scientific knowledge, combining uncertainty, randomness and disorder in the mathematical data.

This very successful period during which he brought into the field of art, the pure abstraction of scientific research, objectivity and rationality of mathematics, also marks the beginnings of a true multidisciplinary approach. In contact with the artists of the Judson school, Bernar Venet, indeed undertakes a ballet project, organizes conferences, and performances that will offer as many pretexts for the deployment of a program of events associated with various actors of the territory. Along with the presentation of a hundred works, many from the Venet Foundation archives, will come to illuminate the creative process of the artist.

The exhibition is considered as a diptych: while MAC Lyon organized a retrospective of his work, the MAMAC offers a plunge into that time specific and intense of his practice, which helped register Bernar Venet among the large artists of the conceptual world of the 1960s.

Office : Hélène Guenin, Director of the MAMAC and Alexandre what, art historian