Bernar Venet’s largest exhibition to date shown in Berlin

Over 150 works by Bernar Venet are currently on show at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin in the largest and most comprehensive retrospective of the French artist worldwide to date. 

Curated by Walter Smerling, ‘Bernar Venet, 1961-2021. 60 Years of Performance, Paintings and Sculptures’ encompasses his entire complex and wide-ranging oeuvre as a sculptor, painter, performance artist and radical conceptual artist. The exhibition brings together work that reflect the artist’s uncompromising, almost obsessive approach to constantly reshaping his environment through art. 

Beginning in his first studio, the exhibition traces Bernar Venet’s career and the creation of a body of work that continues to question itself today. The most frequently exhibited French sculptor to date has always affirmed his conception of art that goes far beyond the formal and spatial. To this day, his aspirations are firmly rooted in the irrepressible desire not to simply accept the world as it is, but rather to give it his own perspective.

Bernar Venet rose to prominence in the late 1960s through the avant-garde art scene in New York and has played an important role in the development of conceptual art. His 1963 installation ‘Tas de charbon’ (Coal Pile) is widely recognised as the first sculpture without a specific shape and also as the first recorded instance of an unmanipulated natural material presented as a work of art.