Bernar Venet. Painting: From Rational to Virtual. 1966–2024

Art Exhibition: Bernar Venet. Painting: From Rational to Virtual. 1966–2024

From 25 January to 27 April 2025, the Art Museum RIGA BOURSE  in Riga (Doma laukums 6) presents a retrospective exhibition by the prominent French artist Bernar Venet, Painting: From Rational to Virtual. 1966–2024, offering a closer look at his oeuvre and significant contribution to the 20th- and 21st-century Conceptual art.

Bernar Venet (1941) is one of the most charismatic figures on the contemporary art scene, a pioneer of Conceptual art. Throughout his career spanning more than 60 years, Venet has been known for producing work that has never ceased to pose questions, and for having been the principal innovator to introduce mathematical linguistics into art. “Bernar Venet constantly challenges the limits of his ideas, possibilities, life, and art as a process. For him, making art means articulating and transforming while involving various disciplines – science, mathematics, music, architecture, physics, geometry, as well as what is happening in the media space,” says Una Meistere, one of the project curators.

Visitors to the exhibition at the Art Museum RIGA BOURSE will see 28 paintings – both examples from the early stages of artist’s career and new works. The central axis of this exposition is mathematics, which, in Venet’s words, encompasses “the greatest abstraction ever created”. The most recent works included in the exhibition are the result of a two-year project involving generative art. These digitally-painted pieces are two-dimensional equivalents of Venet’s sculptural Effondrements in which arcs and angles fall to the ground to create unexpected configurations by obeying the natural laws of gravity. Algorithms are used to generate images – a new technique for Venet and in keeping with his experimental spirit.

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Bernar Venet. Photo: Antoine Baralhe

Bernar Venet. Parabola del Fonction y=2x²+ 3x-2 . 1966. @ ADAGP Paris.