Bernar Venet

Courtesy of the Artist

Born in Château-arnoux-saint-auban, France, 1941

Lives & Works Between New York, New York and Le Muy, France

Bernar Venet first gained recognition in the 1960s for the development of his Tar paintings, Cardboard Reliefs, and his iconic Pile of Coal, a pioneering example of sculpture without a specific shape. The year 1979 marked a significant turning point in Venet’s career: having recently begun a series of wood reliefs, Arcs, Angles, and Straight Lines, he created the first of his Indeterminate Lines and was awarded a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Over the following decades his work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe, the United States, South America, and Asia both in solo museum shows, as well as in major art events such as the Kassel Documenta in 1977, and the Biennales of Paris, Venice and São Paulo. To date, he is the most internationally exhibited French artist with 40 public sculpture exhibitions and monumental works permanently installed in cities including Auckland, Austin, Shenzhen, Berlin, Bonn, Denver, Geneva, Neu-Ulm, Nice, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, Toulouse, and Vancouver.

Venet has been the recipient of many awards including the Grand Prix des Arts de la Ville de Paris and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration. In February 2016, the International Sculpture Center awarded Venet the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award for his exemplary contributions to the field of sculpture. A site-specific monumental installation, Arc Majeur, was erected alongside the E411 highway in Belgium in October 2019.

Venet has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at museums worldwide. These include Bernar Venet, 1961–2021: 60 Years of Sculpture, Painting & Performance at Kunsthalle Berlin, Germany in 2022; Another Language for Painting at the He Art Museum, Foshan, China in 2021-22; and The Hypothesis of Gravity at the Louvre-Lens Museum, France in 2021. In 2018, Venet was the subject of two retrospectives in France: Bernar Venet Retrospective 2019–1959 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in Lyon, and Bernar Venet: The Conceptual Years 1966–1976 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC) in Nice. In addition to his sculptures permanently installed at various public sites across the globe, Venet’s work has been collected by premiere institutions worldwide, 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, among many others.