Bernar Venet: Painting—From Rational to Virtual, 1966–2024

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 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.”

Throughout his career Bernar Venet has been known for producing work that has never ceased to pose questions, and for having been the principal innovator to introduce mathematical linguistics into art. Five years of intense activity in the midst of the New York art scene enabled him to adopt an original approach marked by bringing monosemic signs into the field of art. This work contrasted with what we’re used to seeing in painting, particularly the polysemic signs in figuration and the pansemic signs of abstraction. This totally radical work, the result of a deliberate six-year pause for theoretical reflection, surged forward anew with the creation of the reliefs and sculptures that became better known to the public. In 2000, Venet decided to return to painting with the presentation of mathematical equations and figures from scientific books to demonstrate the immense visual richness of this rational world that artists have always neglected.

His most recent works included in the exhibition are the result of a two-year project involving generative art. These digitally-painted pieces are two-dimensional equivalents of his sculptural Effondrements in which arcs and angles fall to the ground to create unexpected configurations by obeying the natural laws of gravity. In the case of these new paintings, algorithms are used to generate images, a new technique for this artist known for his experimentation.

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 – even debuting as a choreographer. Venet’s work can be found in more than 70 museums worldwide, including such venerable institutions as The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; and Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva. 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.

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.

The project’s curators are Una Meistere and Daiga Rudzāte.