Bernar Venet

Wetterling Gallery is pleased to announce Bernar Venet’s Disorganizing Order, an exhibition focusing on recent Collapses (Effondrements) - in both sculpture and drawing- and paintings from the Diffeomorphism (Difféomorphisme) series.

Primarily known as a sculptor, Venet’s expansive production is multi-faceted, also encompassing drawing, painting, performance, poetry. Our presentation aims to put forward the artist’s guiding “principle of equivalence” which, across several disciplines, allows the expression of his most recent theoretical developments and problematics, governed by concepts of entropy, unpredictability, and auto-referentiality.

Collapses are stacks of Arcs, geometrically determined, but finally arranged by chance and gravity. As such, each unique work is governed by an oscillation between opposites: the unpredictability of chance and the rigorous principles of mathematics. Their horizontality might be perceived as challenging the vertical structure more commonly expected in sculpture historically, while the central role of uncontrolled forces is a nod against constructivism and minimal art.

Offering insight into the range of scales within Venet’s production, a video of a monumental sculpture’s collapse in the artist’s studio in the South of France complements the Collapses and Stacks on display, allowing the viewer to experience the shaping of a final work.

Drawing is employed as a transposition of sculpture into a two-dimensional surface. These collage, graphite and oil stick on paper pieces, titled Collapse – Arcs, are created from studies of installed sculptures taken by the artist, hence created after the sculptural works, not as preparatory studies. They enable the artist to push his reflection further, advancing into the themes that generate enough interest to be developed at a subsequent stage.

The final room of the exhibition houses three examples of Diffeomorphism paintings, in which Venet digitally distorts complex scientific texts, disrupting their legibility. Here again, a rule of opposing forces is prevalent, between the confusion created by the illegibility on the surface, and the logic of the reproduced mathematical formulas.

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Bernar Venet (b. 1941, France) is widely recognized as one of the most important living artists. He is the most internationally exhibited French artist, with more than forty public sculpture exhibitions and monumental works permanently installed at various sites across the globe. His artworks are in the permanent collections of important 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, amongst others. In February 2016, the International Sculpture Center awarded Venet that year’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his exemplary contributions to the field of sculpture.

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