Art

“INDETERMINACY” – BERNAR VENET AT BLAIN SOUTHERN

“Indeterminacy” celebrates two major bodies of works from the last decade by French conceptual artist Bernar Venet. The exhibition at Blain Southern Gallery, Berlin, debuts Venet’s Continuous Curve series, which stems from the artist’s renowned Indeterminate Line sculptures, several iterations of which are shown here, alongside related works on paper.

Alongside the Curves, five large Indeterminate Line sculptures of looping rolled steel stand freely on the ground floor of the gallery. Their order and balance find their counterpoint in what appears to be the same loops, collapsed into a chaotic heap that obstructs the entrance. Venet describes this Effondrement: Five Indeterminate Lines and the accompanying Indeterminate Lines as ‘the result of improvised, intuitive, and empirical work’.

These works are complemented by Venet’s new series of wall reliefs which are – similar to other works in the exhibition – torch-cut from large steel plates and based on mathematical practice. With their reduced, yet imposing elementary lines, they are positioned somewhere between the artist’s sculptural works and works on paper, the latter of which relate to Venet’s Continuous Curves and Indeterminate Lines.

The graphite drawings and collages of lines drawn in heavy oil stick are generated through an equivalent, though less industrial, process to the making of the artist’s torch-cut reliefs.

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