Bernar Venet. Painting: From Rational to Virtual. 1966–2024

A retrospective of the work of pioneering French Conceptual artist Bernar Venet, Bernar Venet. Painting: From Rational to Virtual. 1966-2024, opens at The Art Museum Riga Bourse on 25 January. 

Including 28 paintings by the artist, the show includes early and recent works which address the core theme of mathematics in Venet's work.

As Bernar Venet says: 'I borrow these formulas, these "figures," from science books. It sometimes happens that I add an equation to a figure I have selected, because it complements it, but also because it reduces the formal aspect of certain selected subjects and makes them more complex and less able to be immediately interpreted as a "beautiful image." My subjects are chosen for their novelty, for their visual originality. And often because of their "difference," their "distance" from everything I have learnt about art. The use of mathematics, in my practice, is meant to introduce another reality. This is a language that has its own formal peculiarities, its own organization, its own aesthetic rules. What interests me here is the richness of a proposition freed from the stylistic restraints of the kind of art that identifies with the great historical movements of the 20th century.'

For more information visit The Art Museum Riga Bourse.