The Fields Sculpture Park
at the Omi International Arts Center
is pleased to announce an exhibition June 2nd - October 31st 2002
Click here for images of the reception and installation.
Bernar Venet
Set in a wide open former wheat field, covering over ten acres of rolling hills, Bernar Venet will install ten large scale sculptures.Working with huge sections of steel, Venet forges his material to form beautiful, personal conceptually challenging forms.
Arc majeur.
Projet pour l'Autoroute A6, France,
Hauteur: 54 métres
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Kathleen Triem 518.392 .7656
The Fields Sculpture Park at Omi Presents
BERNAR VENET
June 2nd - October 31st, 2002
Open to the public
BERNAR VENET
June 2nd - October 31st, 2002
Open to the public
Omi International Arts Center is pleased to announce that ten monumental steel sculptures by Bernar Venet are featured at The Fields Sculpture Park from June 2nd - October 31, 2002. These sculptures, which their author characterizes as "lines in space," arrived here from Venet's studio in New York. They were manufactured at the ironworks in the Vosges Mountains, not too far from the artist's French studio and second residence.
Bernar Venet was born in the Alpes de Haute-Provence in 1941. As a promising young artist in Nice, he covered canvases with tar and used charcoal as a raw material, motivated by a need to redefine art's traditional boundaries. A well-articulated intellectual bent and readiness to experiment propelled him to the forefront of what came to be called "Conceptual Art." After moving to New York in 1966, Venet developed a body of work, steeped in non-art propositions he borrowed from mathematicians and theoretical scientists, that was the subject of a five-year retrospective at the New York Cultural Center in 1971.
As an ensemble, the ten sculptures installed at The Fields surpass, in number and volume a similar group of the artist's work which traveled from the capital's historic Champ-de-Mars to public and private sites in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Brussels, Cologne, Basel, Brasilia, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 1996-2000. All variations on Venet's favorite themes, Arts, Angles, Diagonals and Indeterminate Lines, are represented at The Fields, reaching heights ranging from 14 to 55 feet.
Sculpture may now be Venet's major form of expression, but there is not an art medium he has not tried his hand at and some to which he has made pioneering contributions. This spring, the Musee National d 'Art Moderne at the Georges Pompidou in Paris honored those other aspects of the artist's work in an evening performance devoted to poetry, music and film.
The growing literature on Venet's work already includes half a dozen monographs by French and American critics Catherine Millet, Jan Van der Marck, Carter Ratcliff, Donald Kuspit, Pierre Arnauld and Robert C. Morgan. A major effort at documenting the artist's oeuvre from 1961 until 2002, with a critical text by Thomas McEvilley, is underway, scheduled for simultaneous publications by Beureli Veriag in Germany, Editions Marvel in France, and Charta DAP in New York.
Bernar Venet will be on view at The Fields till October 31st, 2002. Educational programming is available to groups upon request. Admission is free and open to the public from dawn till dusk daily.
Bernar Venet has been made possible with generous support from the French government and Francis Greenburger.
Mr. Venet's work has been shown in major public spaces and museums internationally and the show is timed to coincide with the release of his new monograph written by acclaimed critic, Thomas McEvilly.
Deux Lignes indéterminées, 1995. Acier roulé.
275 x 300 x 350 cm.
Collection Mr. & Mme. Werner Welle, Allemagne
Trois lignes indéterminées, 1994. Acier roulé.
273 x 300 x 430 cm.
Exposition sur Le Champs-de-Mars, Paris, France. Eté 1994
Forward to:
www.bernarvenet.com