Bernar Venet: The Fields Sculpture Park At Art Omi International Arts Center

This catalog was produced to accompany an exhibition of ten monumental steel sculptures by Bernar Venet that were featured at The Fields Sculpture Park from June 2 through October 31, 2002. The sculptures — characterized by the artist as “lines in space” — were produced by Venet in the Vosges Mountains in northwestern France and then shipped to the United States, specifically for this exhibition. 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. After a six-year retreat from making art in favor of furthering public understanding of the radical direction his art had taken, Venet returned to the studio. The line, in all its mathematical variations and physical shapes, came to dominate his production for the next ten years. Then, in 1983, Venet hit his stride with the much more personal “indeterminate line,” a departure from the mathematical model, now convoluted and recognizable as a linear improvisation only. All variations on Venet’s favorite themes -- Arcs, Angles, Diagonals and Indeterminate Lines -- were represented at The Fields, reaching heights ranging from 14 to 55 feet. While sculpture has been a major form of expression, Venet has made pioneering contributions in other media as well, including his early Conceptual works and his later wall drawing and monosemic paintings.