Venet Bernar: Solo Show

After featuring his work in the inaugural exhibition “The World Meets Here”, Custot Gallery presents the first solo exhibition of the French artist Bernar Venet in Dubai.

Taking a mathematical and scientific approach to his work, the conceptual artist will show new and recent steel sculptures from his “2Arc, GRIB, Angle and Indeterminate Line series”, an extension of works he developed in 1979. A monumental Cor-Ten steel “Arc” sculpture of 6.5 meters high will be installed in the gallery. Another highlight of the exhibition is the selection of new works on paper on the “GRIB” and “Angles”. Also on view, is an acrylic on canvas, “Homage to Al-Khwarizmi n°2”, part of the series presented at the 2013 Venice Biennale, that honors one of the founders of modern mathematics.

Bernar Venet is a French conceptual artist, he was born in 1941 in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France. He began his career in the 1960s when he coated canvas with tar and exhibited a mere pile of coal as a sculpture. After moving to New York in 1966, where he met the minimalist artists Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin, Venet started making wide-ranging conceptual works including painting, poetry, film and performance. In 1971 he was honored with his first retrospective at the New York Cultural Center. Over the following decades, his work has been exhibited in major museums, art events and public installations in Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, Bogota, Madrid, New York, Nice and Cologne, among others.

Focus on the Arcs Series: ‘An arc is a section of a geometrical figure that is easy to reconstruct – the circle. Unlike what happens with the indeterminate lines, the artist does not leave us stranded without a reference point, with no model to which we could refer to for a better grasp of the work in front of us. But we soon realize that this model, far from helping us situate reference points in space, seems to contradict space. The way the arc seems to bring all the space around it into the imaginary lane on which it is drawn is truly spectacular. The artist has managed to find just the right material, thickness and scale to make the arc remain what it was when he began to use it in his work: an unequivocal gesture, intended solely to mark a surface. Even materialized in steel, the arc is undirectional and tends to transform its surroundings into an image, a picture.