3/F, 27 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District
Archetypes, Bernar Venet’s solo show at Perrotin Shanghai, is a candid and philosophical meditation on the curved line. The exhibition features a performance, two works on paper, and five sculptures. The arcs, tangled parentheses of black patina or rusted flush, hold an elegantly improbable allegiance to both geometry and disorder.
There’s something mutinous about a horizontal arc, toppled over. As art historian Maurice Fréchuret notes in his writing on French conceptual artist Bernar Venet, the archway has long been a symbol of power. And it’s true: upright at city entrances, arches corral bodies and attention toward the center. They tunnel us toward meaning, order, and control. Venet’s leaning, fallen arcs reject all that indoctrination. (After all, an arc for Venet is neutral, a monosemic unit of geometry.) With an impulsive flare, he lets go of structure, meaning, and even artistic authority. The rest is gravity.
Venet has likened his artistic path to sleepwalking, a “combination of accidents and discoveries.” Early on, in the 1960s, he set out to dematerialize art altogether using mathematical equations, diagrams, and maps. These sterile, blank-eyed compositions were pure information, and, brilliantly enough, pure abstraction. They asked, in effect: Can raw data, stripped of narrative or style, be art?
It was a radical advancement in conceptualism, and Venet knew it. In 1967, he said as much, albeit politely, to Marcel Duchamp, who was then more than 50 years his senior. Duchamp, in his characteristically quick-witted way, replied: “La vente de vent est l’event de Venet.” The sale of wind is the event of Venet.
That early logic, buoyed now by a greater scientific and philosophical rigor, continues in Archetypes. On one side of the gallery, four maquettes rest on two pedestals, their radicality easy to overlook. These low-slung nests of arcs, dating from 1998 to 2025, share an affinity for entropy found in Venet’s earliest works: the artist’s body sprawled amid trash in Performance in Garbage (1961); the mound in Pile of Coal (1963) collapsing across the gallery floor.
At scale, Venet’s arcs grow cinematic. Versailles Effondrement: 85.8˚ Arc x 16(2018), now installed outdoors in the south of France, begins with the drama of one towering arc capitulating. The rest follow, sixteen steel giants cascading into a whimsical heap. This spectacle of gravity and chance reappears in Archetypes, during a performance on opening night. A four-and-a-half-meter curved steel bar, rolled in paint and suspended from the ceiling, is swung by the artist against a canvas on the wall. The residual marks will remain in the gallery, a site-specific industrial fascia of a painting.
Across the long gallery room, two maquettes of vertical arcs stretch upwards. Flanking them are two large charcoal and oil stick drawings of interlocking arcs. The works here are self-referential, yet they echo Convergence: 54.5° Arc x 14, Venet’s recent commission for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. In that now permanent public sculpture, fourteen arcs rise in a tented embrace, evoking the Olympic Flame.
Whether in steel or in softer charcoal, the tufted arcs build a porous architecture. Their negative spaces, the hooded eyelets and vacancies between limbs, add a magnetism. And if they are accidentally beautiful, it’s the beauty of dancers’ bodies, insolent and orchestral.
Né en 1941
Habite et travaille à Le Muy, France
Bernar Venet lives and works in Le Muy (France), after having spent more than 50 years in New York. 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.
From a modest background and raised in an industrial town, Bernar Venet attended a year-long painting and drawing course at the Villa Thiole in Nice at the age of 17. The following year (1959), he worked as a stage designer at the Nice Opera, where he learned to conceive and execute large-scale projects. After two years of military service, during which he had use of a studio and produced monochrome paintings with tar, he returned to Nice. In 1966, he went to New York for the first time and befriended American minimalist artists and scientists. At the time, his work was directly inspired by mathematics.
After a few years’ hiatus in his practice, where he taught art theory at the Sorbonne, he returned to New York in 1976. The first canvases from the series Angles and Arcs can be characterized as extremely restrained renderings of geometrical figures. In the following years, he created his first sculptural reliefs in wood and sculptures in steel. His series of Indeterminate Lines and Collapses signals a culmination of his formal research and consists of an experimentation with horizontality, obliquity, and verticality. The installations of these steel forms count among his most emblematic pieces and have a minimalist aesthetic.
Today, Bernar Venet's work can be found in more than a hundred prestigious institutions around the world, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the MoMA (New York), the Guggenheim (New York), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C.), and the Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul). He has also carried out numerous public commissions located in Europe, North America, and Asia. In 2005, Bernar Venet received the insignia of Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur for his contributions to contemporary culture.
À propos de l'artiste
