The Galerie Bigaignon presents “Macadam Noir” by Bernar Venet, produced in 1963. This is the first time that Bigaignon dedicates an exhibition to him since the announcement of the representation of his photographic work at the beginning of 2024. With the series “ Macadam Noir”, Bernar Venet explored formal abstraction with photographs made from close-ups of tarmac on the ground.
Bernar Venet became known through his works of conceptual art using different media: painting, drawing, sound, sculpture, poetry, film, performance. His work spans more than six decades. Photography has held a special place since his very beginnings in Nice in the 1960s.
From 1961 to 1963, Bernar Venet produced a number of works based on a “principle of equivalence” which allowed him to transmit the same content through different mediums, with the color black as a common thread, this black which embodies the refusal of easy communication while praising a form of austerity in opposition to emerging figuration and the dazzling lyrical abstraction of the 1960s. This decade was marked by an approach based on constant experimentation, which led to new typologies of sculptural, pictorial, sound and photographic works characterized by neutrality, serial production and the rejection of composition.
Because in fact, with Bernar Venet, photography is necessarily conceptual and experimental. In 1963, he created a photographic series, Macadam Noir, whose photos were taken from close-ups of tarmac. Conceived as a continuation of his first black monochrome paintings and his Tars, this series is part of this prolific context and breaks with the use of photography hitherto employed as a means of documenting or bearing witness to an artistic event.
In response to Hans Ulrich Obrist, during an interview given on the occasion of the release of the book “Photographs” (Ed. rueVisconti), Bernar Venet explains: “As far as I am concerned, photography has established itself as a discipline which allowed me to enrich the conceptual and visual scope of my work. The status of a work of art is achieved when artists, with extreme demands, use it, not to refine the technique and offer attractive images, but to question subjects, and new potentials.
The exhibition which is held from October 12 to November 30, visible both during Art Basel Paris and Paris Photo, will present for the first time the entire series, i.e. 26 silver prints, in a specially designed scenography.
Born in 1941, Bernar Venet is considered the most exhibited French artist in the world, his work having been presented for over 50 years in some of the most prestigious museums and is part of renowned collections such as those of MoMA (New York ), the Center Pompidou (Paris), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the LACMA (Los Angeles), the National Gallery of Art (Washington), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Kunsthalle in Hamburg (Germany) and many others.
Bernar Venet : Macadam 1963
Until November 30, 2024
Galerie Bigaignon
18 rue du Bourg-Tibourg
75004 Paris, France
Tel. +33.(0)1.83.56.05.82
www.bigaignon.com
