Bernar Venet | 97.5º Arc x 9 | 2007

French artist Bernar Venet produces sculpture, painting, drawings, music, theater sets, poetry, film, furniture and stained-glass windows. While he worked as a conceptual artist in the 1970s, not relying on the materiality of product to create his work, his constant insistence on lines—straight, curved, broken or indeterminate—is a common thread throughout his fifty-year career. Venet is a “systems” artist—he uses self-generated systems to drive the shape of his lines and arcs. Like many of the Minimalists of the 1960s and 1970s, Venet relinquishes authority over his creations, yet the clarity of his vision is what links the works together.

97.5° Arc x 9, 2007, is exactly as described: the 9 lines at 97.5 degree arc bend in a permanent wind, the metal lines seeming pliant against the invisible forces of nature. While using mathematical systems to generate forms might suggest the removal of the human hand, ultimately math is rooted in nature, the artist unable to escape the very environment in which his works live. His architectural-scaled arcs and lines resist the rigidity of building geometry; his works are more like slumped building infrastructure. Venet makes something hard look soft.