Concepts in Form: Bernar Venet

Gow Langsford is thrilled to present a solo exhibition of sculptures by internationally renowned French artist, Bernar Venet. Active since the 1960s, Venet’s decades long career has been an enduring enquiry into the conceptual possibilities of art. His fascination with the creative productivity of mathematical principles can be experienced through his use of bold lines and balanced arcs, an aesthetic and intellectual framework that is recognisably Venet’s own.

It is this conceptual rigour that underpins the artist’s interplay between the physical (geometric shapes) and the metaphysical (concepts of chance and entropy). Venet’s work at once examines the harmony and dissonance between these dual principles; the ways in which the physical and the metaphysical converge and diverge and the complex confrontations and contradictions at play between the two.

“Venet has inculcated within his process a profound understanding of physical space and of proportion, for the dimensions of individual elements, their number and how they accumulate volume through repetition and placement are crucial.” [i]

This exhibition is a confluence of the silhouettes that have defined Venet’s career. From his Arcs, Stacks and Acute Unequal Angles to his Indeterminate Line, we witness an enquiry into the practice of sculpture and the principles of deconstruction that are inherently connected to it. The artist’s affinity for the concept of the line has compelled him to explore its form in manifold configurations. Through the lens of order and disorder, the chaotic and the unpredictable, each approach facilitates new directions for the enrichment of his sculptural practice.

There is a singularity to Venet’s work not only in form but also in concept. Each object is announced in its title, from the softly curving rolled steel of 88.5° Arc x 19, to the contorting spirals of Indeterminate Line. Venet’s sculptures of recent years demand to be seen as wholes; as singular and indivisible presences. “My sculptures are self-referential in the sense that they tell their own story, the story of their elaboration. In this way, they stand apart from the classical object that hides its sculptural identity and ‘speaks of something else’.”

For Venet, any form of symbolic structure that requires an excess of interpretation or expressive content is unnecessary. This absence would become the direction of his sculpture, a theme that would evolve to define many of his large-scale Corten steel works.

Venet’s work has been widely exhibited throughout Europe, North and South America, and Asia. It is held in the collections of premiere international institutions, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the National Museum of Art, Seoul; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Gow Langsford Gallery has represented Bernar Venet since 2006.

[i] Florence Derieux, Clare Lilley and Barry Schwabsky, “073 FOCUS” in Bernar Venet (London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2020). Pp86.