À LA RECHERCHE DE VERA MOLNAR - WORKS BY VERA MOLNAR AND CONTEMPORARY REFLECTIONS
The Ludwig Museum's exhibition À la recherche de Vera Molnar pays tribute to the life's work of Vera Molnar, who died shortly before her 100th birthday. Born in Hungary, the artist studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts and lived and worked in France from 1947 until her death. From 1968, she was one of the first to create works of art using a real computer, and is still considered one of the world's foremost pioneers of computer art.
The title of the exhibition refers to Vera Molnar's series À la recherche de Paul Klee, recalling the artist's attempts to explore, through her own creative methods and tools, the art historical predecessors that have defined her. Like the narrator of Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), Molnar was not interested in merely recalling the past, but in reinterpreting it in the context of the present.
Schedule
In this spirit, the first half of the two-part exhibition at the Ludwig Museum will review the defining chapters of Vera Molnar's career. The unique and reproduced series of prints and paintings on show, from the late 1960s to the present day, present the most important themes and groups of works from this extraordinary oeuvre, tracing the evolution of Molnar's systems of line and form.
Vera Molnar's works are based on programmed algorithms and are constructed from basic geometric shapes. Initially she experimented with very simple algorithms. Her serial works are the result of small changes to the basic elements, adding, in the artist's words, "1% of mess". In his working method, discovery and chance played a major role. For Molnar, computer-generated chance opened up a horizon of possibilities, but the decision and choice always remained in the hands of the artist. Balancing on the borderline between order and disorder, his compositions combine geometric form with playfulness and a personal, idiosyncratic sensibility.
In the other half of the exhibition space, a special first-of-its-kind selection of works by invited internationally renowned artists will pay homage to the oeuvre, exploring its various layers of meaning, its influence on contemporary art and its afterlife.
Ludwig Museum
The Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art, located in Müpa, is the first museum in Hungary to exclusively collect contemporary art. In addition to a permanent exhibition of the collection donated by the Ludwigs and a number of temporary exhibitions, the museum aims to raise awareness of the works and their creators through special publications and a variety of art education and art education programmes.
