Vera Molnár:
Carrément (Squarely)
An Online Exhibition
July - October, 2021
Vera Molnár: Carrément (Squarely)
An Online Exhibition, July - September 2021
shopmaker MODERN is pleased to present an online exhibition of work by the internationally-recognized digital artist Vera Molnár. Still active today at age 97, her remarkable practice encompasses painting, drawing, collage, and installation. This exhibition will feature an important selection of never-before exhibited abstract and Constructivist-derived works on paper made between 1947 and 1966, as well as a group of the artist’s pioneering computer drawings which date from 1968 to 1983. Selected works in the online exhibit are accompanied by translated recollections the artist had in conversation with her friend, the writer Isabelle Spaak.
Born in Budapest in 1924, Vera Molnár established a prominent position for herself in the field of Constructivist/Concrete art before venturing into the world of computers. She received traditional training in painting, drawing, art history, and aesthetics at the Budapest College of Fine Arts where she would meet her husband and earliest collaborator, François Molnár. Following the couple’s move in 1947 to Paris, where she still lives today, Vera formed important relationships with her contemporaries, including a close friendship with the noted abstract artist Sonia Delaunay. However, it would be the Swiss constructivist and theorist Max Bill, and the leading French abstractionist François Morellet who would help to shape Molnár’s early career. Working alongside such artists as Morellet, Julio Le Parc, and Jésus Rafael Soto, Vera and François Molnár became founding members in 1960 of the Research Group for Visual Art (“Groupe de Rechereche d’art Visuel” or GRAV) which espoused minimal, non-objective image-making, and which later gave rise to the Op-Art and Kinetic Art movements of the following decade. Though François began his career as an artist, his abiding interest in theoretical science would lead to a teaching career in the fields of aesthetics and the phenomenology of perception. Together, however, Vera and François would continue to share an enduring interest in the mathematical foundation of compositional arrangement.
As early at 1968, the computer became a central device in the making of Molnár’s paintings and drawings, allowing her to more comprehensively investigate endless variations in geometric shape and line. Molnár learned the early programing languages of Fortran and Basic, and gained access to a computer at a research lab in Paris where she began to make computer drawings on a plotter based on her own algorithms. Several of these early drawings are included in the exhibition. Using the computer’s high calculation speed and signal capacity to arrive at a large number of variables, Molnár nonetheless insists upon the importance of hazard and chance in the final outcome. By injecting small programming ‘interruptions’, she found she was able to offset predictable outcomes.
Vera Molnár’s work has garnered considerable international recognition in recent years. Solo-exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch, Germany (2021); Museum of Digital Art, Zurich (2019); Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen (2012); Musée des Beaux-Arts, Budapest (2010). Her work has been included in several group-exhibitions, most notably Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020-21); By Any Means: Contemporary Drawings from The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (2018); Thinking Machines, Art and Design in the Digital Age, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017).
Currently Molnár’s work is featured in the exhibition Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris through August 23, and Vera Molnár: Pas froid aux yeux, Espace de l’art Concret, Mouans-Sartoux, France through September 12.
Her work is included in the following public collections: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Kunsthalle Bremen; National Gallery, Budapest; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Please address all inquiries larryshopmaker@gmail.com.
EXHIBITION
Featured
Vera Molnár, portrait by Linda Hollinger