Perrotin is delighted to return to West Bund Art & Design 2024 with a curated showcase of works by renowned artists from its roster, along with artists collaborating with the gallery for the first time. A distinctive nested presentation by the seminal French artist Bernar Venet will be unveiled at the booth.
Bernar Venet emerged from the American avant-garde in the 1960s, and is considered the most important French contemporary sculptor of the postwar period. Particularly renowned for his large-scale steel sculptures, he practices an art that is impervious to the author’s subjectivity and uses industrial materials and methods. He is a conceptual artist influenced by minimal art. His prolific output includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, sound recordings, photographs and furniture.
Clarity and objectivity are paramount for Venet, and his work rejects the burden of symbolic structures or interpretive overlays. This lends his art a unique surrender, a yielding to the materials themselves. Whether it’s steel bars stacked, arcs curving into space, or lines scribing the air, Venet allows his materials to dictate their own form—to bend, to arc, to pile, to find their way into being.
As seen in Perrotin’s solo presentation at West Bund Art& Design 2024, Venet’s artistic journey is deeply rooted in the exploration of the line. The presentation consists of a body of key works: four works on paper flanking a central sculpture. The dense, oil-stick collages arise from a process akin to that of Venet’s laser-cut reliefs. In his two-dimensional works, the industrial edge softens, ceding a more muffled texture yet no less rigorous in its conception.
For Venet, inscribing a line on paper or in space is not meant to be a poetic or coded expression. The line is a pure and physical gesture without the weight of metaphor. Both the Angles and Arcs series on display extend this meditation on the line into something spatial and immersive. These works are not fixed; they shift and recalibrate depending on the viewer’s vantage.
“Beyond Concept and Matter,” the artist’s largest institutional show in Asia to date, is currently on view at Phoenix International Media Centre, Beijing, until 28 February 2025.
The booth will also exhibit a selection of artworks by Anna-Eva Bergman, Lynn Chadwick, Gabriel de la Mora, Bernard Frize, Laurent Grasso, Henry Gunderson, Hans Hartung, Thilo Heinzmann, Kara Joslyn, JR, Lee Bae, Georges Mathieu, Qi Zhuo, Sigrid Sandström, Xavier Veilhan, Robin F. Williams and Xie Qi.
In addition, to concurrent with the solo shows of Ali Banisadr, The Fortune Teller, and Amy Cutler, Truce, at Perrotin Shanghai, both artists will present new works at the fair.
