Description

‘‘My life is squares, triangles, lines. I am mad about lines.''- said Vera Molnár, a Hungarian born artist naturalized French. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest before immigrating to France. She is the co-founder of GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), a group which investigated collaborative approaches to mechanical and kinetic art. First the artist invented the “machine imaginaire”, an algorithm which created images with abstract geometric shapes and forms. In 1968 she integrated computers in her artistic practice, becoming one of the first pioneers of computer art. With the computer she was able to input commands which were printed on paper via a plotter. The "Histoire d’I, en Creux et en Relief" shows the playfulness inherent in a rigid system: the left side of the relief is the negative image of the right side. The squares are exactly at the same place on both sides of the print-out, but on the left side they are hollow and the background is the relief while on the right side the squares are the reliefs and the background is hollowed out. The algorithm was created in 1966 and printed on an aluminium board in 2005. The artist just had a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes entitled “Not cold in the eyes”. Vera Molnár is the oldest living artist who will be exhibiting at 59th Venice Biennial curated exhibition by Cecilia Alemanni "The Milk of Dreams”.