PARIS — The late Hungarian-born artist Vera Molnár discovered patterns in every single place: in architectural particulars, in optic artwork, even in goals. Spanning a exceptional eight many years of her 99-year life, Communicate to the Eye, the Centre Pompidou’s compact but formidable exhibition of this little-known pc artwork pioneer, highlights her lasting fascination with geometry, disrupted notion, and technological experimentation.
After learning artwork in Budapest, Molnár settled in Paris in 1947, the place she quickly embraced Concrete Artwork. Her early coloration research anchor the primary galleries of this chronological exhibition and sign the present’s leitmotif of the artist’s fixation with the way in which we understand patterns. Within the portray “2 blue rectangles, 4 black rectangles” (1950), as an illustration, blue rectangles are enclosed in black ones, partly separated by bands of white area. Relying on one’s viewing angle, the black paint can tackle bluish hues.
Beginning with the late Sixties, algorithmic repetition takes on better significance in Molnár’s compositions, hinting at her later use of computer systems. In a sequence of works, every titled “On the lookout for Paul Klee” (1969–70), orderly geometry is repeatedly disrupted by irregular patterns, ensuing within the impression of a software program program gone awry. Entries in journals Molnár stored between 1976 and 2020, gathered in 22 volumes displayed in glass vitrines, additional show her relentless seek for patterns. The title of one in every of her journals, Geometries of Pleasure (1985–87), additionally suggests her enjoyment of taking part in with construction to a sure diploma — after which letting her energetic strains and figures get away of the grid.
The devotion with which Molnár produced these fugitive entries means that she noticed them primarily as a method to prepare her eye. Nonetheless, a few of them have been realized as full-fledged artworks. A 1987 collage for the Competition du Vent, an annual arts pageant in Calvi, France, whose identify interprets to “Competition of the Wind,” explores the methods wherein pure phenomena might be expressed geometrically. This work appears to provide rise to the set up “OTTWW” (1981–2010), additionally featured within the exhibition, wherein a black thread is stretched over nails in zigzags, the repetition of the letter “W” recalling a jumpy electrocardiogram.
In situating algorithms on equal footing with a plurality of media and helps, starting from paper and thread to steel and mirrors, the exhibition means that Molnár noticed the pc as a device like every other. In her computer-based works, she appears to hunt freedom inside systematism and improvisation inside predictability, within the vein of artists resembling Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. In works resembling “The Metamorphosis of Albrecht Dürer” (1994–2017), she designed algorithms that she then ran by a program, on this case one which incrementally modified the initials of the German artist to her personal. Elsewhere, as within the portray “Trapezes or strains (1200%)?” (1987–2014), she units up a system of guidelines for herself, as if she have been a machine. In different works nonetheless, Molnár engages the fabric embodiment of algorithmic design. Her current steel sculpture “A perspective of a line” (2014–19), which she based mostly on a computer-generated picture, casts intricate slanting shadows in a lyrical, haunting play of sunshine.
In response to the exhibition catalog, Molnár was identified to quote Paul Klee’s aphorism, “Artwork is an error within the system.” Maybe essentially the most thrilling facet of her artwork was this recognition that not even an algorithmic intelligence was fully predictable — and her pleasure find within the glitch an affirmation of creativity.
Vera Molnár: Communicate to the Eye continues at Centre Pompidou (Place Georges-Pompidou, Paris) by August 26. The exhibition was organized by the museum.