The Art Museum Riga Bourse will present, ‘Bernar Venet. Painting: From Rational to Virtual. 1966–2024’, a retrospective of the work of pioneering French Conceptual artist Bernar Venet, from January 25 to April 27, 2025. Venet is one of the most charismatic figures on the contemporary art scene, making this exhibition an opportunity to explore not only the work of a unique artist but also his significant contributions to both twenty and twenty-first-century Conceptual art.
The exhibition – which has been created especially for Riga and the Great Hall of the Art Museum Riga Bourse, – is being produced by the culture and art portal Arterritory.com in collaboration with Bernar Venet Studio and the Latvian National Museum of Art. ‘Bernar Venet constantly challenges the limits of his ideas, possibilities, life, and art as a process. For him, making art means articulating and transforming while involving various disciplines – science, mathematics, music, architecture, physics and geometry, as well as what is happening in the media space,’ says Una Meistere, one of the project’s curators.
The exhibition will include a total of 28 paintings by the artist, presenting both recent works and examples from the early stages of Venet’s career. The central axis of this exhibition is mathematics, which, in Venet’s words, encompasses ‘the greatest abstraction ever created’.
Bernar Venet. Photo: Antoine Baralhe
He 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.’
Venet is widely known for his monumental sculptures, with his 18-metre-high, 40-tonne steel Convergence: 54.5˚ Arc x 14 being the only permanent public artwork created specifically for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympic games. He has, over a career spanning more than 60 years, worked across a wide range of media: painting, installation, drawing, sculpture, stage design, and music composition – and has even debuted as a choreographer. Venet’s work can be seen in the world’s leading museums, institutions, galleries and contemporary art collections. In 2016, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Sculpture Center in New York. After many years living in New York, Venet now resides in the village of Le Muy in the South of France, where the Venet Foundation has acquired the status of a special European cultural destination.
Vita Birzaka, project manager for the exhibition at the Art Museum Riga Bourse, explains, ‘In the context of the Museum’s programming, I think it is very important to continue with certain regularity the development of international exhibition projects that make contemporary art from around the world accessible to our region’s audiences. In the case of Venet, it also creates a special interplay with the opulent 19th-century interior of the Bourse by juxtaposing the mathematical abstraction and dynamism of the compositions with the majestic symmetry of the space.’
Bernar Venet. Related to: “Parametric Ordinary Differential Equation of the First Order in Two Dimensions”, 2000. Acrylic on canvas, varnished / 195.5 x 263.5 cm (unframed); 203.2 x 269.2 cm (framed)
To mark the opening of the exhibition and in collaboration with the University of Latvia, a public lecture by Bernar Venet will be held on January 23 at 16:00 in the University’s Small Hall. The event will be begin with a conversation between Bernar Venet and Mārcis Auziņš, a physicist and quantum physics researcher at the University.
The project’s curators are Una Meistere and Daiga Rudzāte, the exhibition’s architect is Martins Vizbulis, and its graphic designer is Krišs Salmanis.
The exhibition, ‘Bernar Venet. Painting: From Rational to Virtual. 1966–2024’ is supported by Bentley Riga, the University of Latvia, Dūrmuiža, Malvīne, the Investment and Tourism Agency of Riga, the Embassy of France, and the French Cultural Institute.
