Bernar Venet presents at Berlin’s former Tempelhof Airport

The exhibition “Bernar Venet, 1961-2021, 60 Years of Performance, Paintings and Sculptures” is the largest and most comprehensive retrospective of the internationally renowned French artist Bernar Venet. It encompasses his entire complex and wide-ranging oeuvre as a sculptor, painter, performance artist, and a radical conceptual artist. On view from 29th January 2022 to 30 May 2022, the exhibition brings together over 150 works by the artist. This is the first in a series of exhibitions that will be shown over the next two years in the 8,000-square-foot Hangars 2 and 3 of Berlin’s emblematic Tempelhof Airport.

Organized by the ‘Stiftung für Kunst and Kultur’, and curated by Walter Smerling, the exhibition charts the trajectory of Venet's career. Venet pays tribute to the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Dr. Paul Wember – the very first person to grant the artist a solo exhibition in 1970. From the beginning in his first art studio, the exhibition traces Bernar Venet's career and the creation of work that continues to this day to question itself. Venet’s design ethos is firmly rooted in the desire to never simply accept the world as it is, instead creating your own perspective. His conception of art that goes far beyond the formal and spatial.The artist aspires to reshape the environment through his work, giving new dimensions to landscapes and spaces, allowing the observer to differently view and feel the energetically charged space in which his signature steel lines, arcs and angles are installed.

One of the key attractions of the exhibition is Venet’s work from 1966 to 1970 - his conceptual years in the United States of America- revealing the artist's radical approach which helped him gain recognition from a young age. Since 1979, Venet’s work including his ‘Indeterminate Lines,’ has taken a turn towards the formalist. The French sculptor will also use the sculptural elements of his large-scale installation at the Louvre Lens, France to specially conceive four different installations made of Arcs, Angles and Straight Lines unfolding across the Airport’s spacious, yet seldom invested warehouses.

In tandem with his sculptural work, Venet will exhibit his entire painting collection, from his first 1961 Goudron (Tar) paintings to his most recent, Equations and Saturations. The paintings feature characteristic textual and mathematical symbols inscribed over richly coloured backgrounds. Through these paintings, Venet rejects formalism along with the idea of abstraction. While abstract-art commonly refers to what is non-figurative, by presenting what are usually defined as “mathematical objects” (numbers, figures, spaces, functions, relations, structures), these works challenge the conventional ideas of abstraction. Venet renders his optimistic aspirations not to reinvent the world but to alter his viewers perception of it.

The space will be activated by on-site performances throughout the course of the exhibition. One such performance is the ‘Domino Effondrement, first performed in 2021 as part of the Venet Foundation’s annual exhibition (Le Muy, France). Iterations of ‘The Steel Bar and the Pictorial Memory of the Gesture’ performance will also be presented, which uses line as a tool to intersect the mediums of performance, painting, and sculpture. Venet uses a steel beam coated in paint to leave traces of the movement of the bar on the walls. The performance highlights how the body can be used to bring the mathematical concept of the line to life.