Exhibition of works by Bernar Venet opens at the Art Museum Riga Bourse
Bernar Venet. Painting: From Rational to Virtual. 1966–2024
Until 27 April, the Art Museum Riga Bourse is hosting a retrospective of the pioneer of conceptual art, French artist Bernar Venet, Bernar Venet. Painting: From Rational to Virtual. 1966–2024. Venet is one of the most charismatic figures on the contemporary art scene, making this exhibition an opportunity to explore not only the work of a unique artist but also his significant contributions to both twenty and twenty-first-century Conceptual art.
The exhibition – which has been created especially for Riga and the Great Hall of the Art Museum Riga Bourse, – is being produced by the culture and art portal Arterritory.com in collaboration with Bernar Venet Studio and the Latvian National Museum of Art. ‘Bernar Venet constantly challenges the limits of his ideas, possibilities, life, and art as a process. For him, making art means articulating and transforming while involving various disciplines – science, mathematics, music, architecture, physics and geometry, as well as what is happening in the media space,’ says Una Meistere, one of the project’s curators.
The exhibition features 28 paintings by the artist, presenting both recent works and examples from the early stages of Venet’s career. The central axis of this exhibition is mathematics, which, in Venet’s words, encompasses ‘the greatest abstraction ever created’.
At the opening of the exhibition, Bernar Venet presented the Art Museum Riga Bourse with a donation – the work on display in the exhibition, Generative Angles Painting – Purple 6, 2024. In an interview with Arterritory.com, Bernar Venet says: ‘Approaching the pieces as visual sculpture based on complex computer coding, these works are digital paintings of images generated by an algorithm. These paintings were produced, framed, and hung in the gallery Perrotin’s space in Paris. In this project, the algorithm helped to create an infinity of formal possibilities and unexpected configurations that correspond conceptually to my latest large sculptures.’ It should be emphasised that Venet is widely known for his monumental sculptures.
Diane Venet, Una Meistere, Bernar Venet and Daiga Rudzāte in front of the work "Generative Angles Painting – Purple 6", 2024
The exhibition, Bernar Venet. Painting: From Rational to Virtual. 1966–2024 is supported by Bentley Riga, the University of Latvia, Dūrmuiža, COBALT Legal, Malvīne, the Investment and Tourism Agency of Riga, the Embassy of France, and the French Institute in Latvia.
