VICTOR VASARELY – THE REDISCOVERY OF THE PAINTER
MUSEUM HAUS KONSTRUKTIV
27 February 2014 - 18 May 2014
VICTOR VASARELY – THE REDISCOVERY OF THE PAINTER
MUSEUM HAUS KONSTRUKTIV
27 February 2014 - 18 May 2014
A collaboration with Musée d’Ixelles, Brussels, and EMMA – Espoo
Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, curated by Serge Lemoine
Museum Haus Konstruktiv is pleased to be able to present the
long-awaited exhibition "Victor Vasarely – The Rediscovery of the
Painter". The intention behind this exhibition, curated by Serge Lemoine
with high-quality loaned pieces from major private collections and
internationally renowned museums, is to demonstrate the talent of an
extraordinary painter, whose work has been wrongly forgotten in recent years.
Already during his time as a student at the art school Műhely, the so-called
"Budapest Bauhaus", Vasarely ( b. 1906 in Pécs, Hungary, d. 1997 in
Paris ) experimented with spatial effects. After moving to Paris in the year
1930, he worked as a commercial graphic designer and simultaneously began to
formulate his artistic language of forms. As a contemporary of the Zurich
Concretists Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, Camille Graeser and Verena
Loewensberg, Vasarely had a lot in common with their concept of art. However,
at the end of the 1940s, Vasarely began to move in a different direction. In
this regard, Serge Lemoine writes that Vasarely "gave priority to the
composition, to the relationships and contrasts, to playing with color tones,
and integrated the phenomena of perception into his work more and more."
Vasarely himself referred to the year 1947 as the one in which he
committed himself to abstraction: "It was not until 1947 that the
'abstract' really and truly revealed itself to me, as I realized that pure
form-color could mean the world." The exhibition at Museum Haus
Konstruktiv covers the years 1947 to 1974, a time characterized by various
periods of work, which to some extent must be seen as work processes generated
in parallel: "Belle-Isle", "Gordes-Cristal",
"Denfert", "Black and White / Kinetics", "Planetary
Folklore", "Permutation", "Vonal", "Vega"
and "Hommage à l'Hexagon". In the museum Haus Konstruktiv, these
creative phases are shown in a representative inventory.
While the artist abstracted representational motifs (e.g. pebbles,
shells, windows and backlit urban skylines) in the groups of works entitled
"Belle-Isle" and "Gordes-Cristal" (1947–60), he interpreted
the fine, abstract craquelure of the tiles in the metro station
Denfert-Rochereau as a kind of landscape in the "Denfert" works
(1947–58). The period from 1951 to 1954 is the one in which the artist worked
exclusively with black-and-white compositions, and which also gave rise to his
first "kinetic depth paintings": overlaid Plexiglas panels with
black-and-white compositions that generate specific spatial effects. While the
"kinetic depth paintings" encourage actual movement on the part of
the observer, the two-dimensional structural overlays were developed to
activate the seeing process and to create a general uncertainty regarding
perception. In the latter, the element of motion is primarily of a virtual
nature.
The tendency toward the two-dimensional continued consistently in
the paintings from the "Planetary Folklore" period and in the 1960s
compositions composed of "plastic units". In 1959, Vasarely patented
the "unités plastiques" system, which provides a basis for almost
unlimited variations in form and color. For this purpose, he punched round,
oval, square, tubular or triangular forms out of a colored square and assembled
an equivalent within the cut-out in contrasting colors. Via permutation of
colors and forms, he thus created an infinite diversity of formal combinations
that were intended to cause the retina to be "set in vibration"
(Vasarely). This "plastic alphabet" equates to a concept of art, in
which the focus is not on artistic style, but on the division between concept
and practical realization. Vasarely called into question the concept of the
original, in that he left the realization of his works to his staff and
concentrated on supervision of the development process. The artist himself
conceived each work as a prototype ("departure prototype") that could
be reproduced in series and enabled implementation as a painting, screenprint,
relief, sculpture or three-dimensional object. Against this backdrop, Victor
Vasarely, who has taken a permanent place in art history as a key figure within
op art, can certainly also be seen as a precursor of conceptual art.
Vasarely's career peaked in the 1970s. To no small extent, the
artist met the enormous demand for his works by means of editions and
multiples. The associated discussions about the aura, authenticity and value of
an artwork marked the beginning of the end of his career. Paradoxically, it was
precisely this conceptually defined abolition of artisanal authorship that
paved the way for this to happen.
http://www.hauskonstruktiv.ch/en/ausstellungen/victor-vasarely.html
DARJEELING 1952
Oil on Canvas 108 * 100 cm
© 2013, Pro Litteris, Zurich
BIADAN 1959
VICTOR VASARELY -
THE REDISCOVERY OF THE PAINTER
Exhibition View
Museum Haus Konstruktiv 2014
Photo: Stefan Altenburger
VICTOR VASARELY - THE REDISCOVERY OF THE PAINTER
Exhibition View
Museum Haus Konstruktiv 2014
Photo: Stefan Altenburger
VICTOR VASARELY - THE REDISCOVERY OF THE PAINTER
Exhibition View
Museum Haus Konstruktiv 2014
Photo: Stefan Altenburger
FIGI MAJUS MC – 1967
“I cannot prevent myself from feeling a
troubling analogy between my “visual kinetics” (plastique-cinétique) and the
ensemble of the micro and macrocosm. Everything is there: Space, Time, Bodies,
and Waves, the relations and the fields. My art transposes nature thus one more
time, this moment right now, the one of pure physics that renders the world
physically comprehensible.”
Victor Vasarely
MUSEUM HAUS KONSTRUKTIV
MUSEUM HAUS KONSTRUKTIV
METAGALAXIE 1961
Painting on Canvas 160 * 147,5 cm
© 2013, Pro Litteris, Zurich
VICTOR VASARELY - THE REDISCOVERY OF THE PAINTER
Exhibition View
Museum Haus Konstruktiv 2014
Photo: Stefan Altenburger
“The individual will never be capable of
knowing it all. Therefore, electronics will always help us more and more to
them in the contours of this vast heap of knowledge, to locate the ones in
relation to the others, and obtain an intuition of synthesis. No artistic
creation of value is any longer conceivable without this global idea of the
living world. We must therefore completely rethink the reasons of the creative
step and its effect on fellow men. We now know that through the successive
levels of the processes of complication of the unit-particle-wave we arrive at
the human phenomenon. Art can no longer have a divine explanation, just a
beautiful and very materialistic one. ‘’
Victor Vasarely
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ONDHO 1956-60
Oil on canvas 220 x
180.4 cm
©
2014 Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris
VICTOR VASARELY - THE REDISCOVERY OF THE PAINTER
Exhibition View
Museum Haus Konstruktiv 2014
Photo: Stefan Altenburger
VICTOR VASARELY - THE REDISCOVERY OF THE PAINTER
Exhibition View
Museum Haus Konstruktiv 2014
Photo: Stefan Altenburger
VICTOR VASARELY
Victor Vasarely is a unique artist in the history of twentieth
century art. Famous during his lifetime, he distinguished himself from
contemporary art with the creation of a new movement: optical art. The
evolution of his life of work is inherently coherent, progressing from graphic
art to the artist’s determination to promote a social art that is accessible to
all.
Victor Vasarely was born in Pécs, Hungary in 1906. In 1925, after
graduating from secondary school, he studied medicine briefly at the University
of Budapest. Even though he did not pursue these medical studies past two
years, Vasarely acquired a commitment to method, objectivity, science and the
thirst for knowledge which would follow him all throughout his life.
In 1929, he enrolled in Muhely, known as the Bauhaus of Budapest.
This school, founded by Alexander Bortnyik and modeled on the Bauhaus of
Dessau, Germany taught the lessons of artists such as Walter Gropius, Wassily
Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Josef Albers. The impact of Bauhaus teachings on
Vasarely’s lifetime of work would turn out to be considerable. During this
period he discovered Abstract art and was introduced to constructivism. This is
when he produced his famous “Etude bleue” and “Etude
verte” (1929). He also devised and supported theories which promote art
that is less individualistic and more collective, art which adapts to the
changing modern world and to the world of industry.
Under the pressure of the Hungarian government at the time,
numerous avant-garde movements were being associated with the progressive
movement that was developing in politics. Like a number of his compatriots,
Vasarely left Hungary and settled in Paris in 1930. He began working as a
designer/creative artist at the Havas advertising agency and at Draeger's, a
renowned printer of the time. His graphic work in these agencies and later in
Dewambez, allowed him to approach the world of design and aesthetics “while
playing (his) role as a plastic artist.”
You may read more information about Victor Vasarely with seeing his
art works to click below link from my blog.
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2014/03/victor-vasarelythe-inventor-of-op-art.html
