Vasarely | Exhibition Catalog

Description

With Vasarely, the sharing of forms, the Center Pompidou presents the first French retrospective devoted to the father of optical art for more than 50 years.
After a childhood between Pécs and Budapest, Victor Vasarely moved to Paris in 1930 where he worked for advertising agencies as a graphic artist. He then laid the foundations of Opt Art, which flourished in the mid-1950s. This iconic genre of Vasarely's work, better known to the general public under its full name of Optical Art, consists of playing with a reduced number of shapes and colors to create illusions of methodical and scientific optics.
At the time of the technical reproducibility of the work of art, Vasarely aspires to give a mathematical basis to his art.
His varied productions - paintings, multiples, commercials, architectural projects - give an account of this approach associating rationality and creation.
Anchored in the economic and social context of the years 1960-1970, the artist also illustrates the major societal changes by appropriating advertising and the mass media, a decidedly modern bias. Thanks to his pop abstractions, Vasarely becomes a major figure of popular culture and embodies the imagination of the Thirties Glorious.
For the first time, this retrospective gives full space to all aspects of the artist's creation. She gives to see and understand all facets of her prolific work. Following a chronological itinerary, the exhibition tackles the major stages of the artist's life, from his formation in the footsteps of the Bauhaus to his last formal innovations, around the fourth dimension.
Commissioner: Mnam / Cci, Mr. Gauthier, A. Pierre