223.5° ARC x 4. 2007.
Sculpture. Steel with naturally corrodded patina.
Inscribed "223,5° ARC x 4". Unique piece. Ca. 104 x 102 x 30 cm (40,9 x 40,1 x 11,8 in).

The work is registered in the Bernar Venet Studio Archives, New York, under the number: bv07s46.

Bernar Venet was born in Château-Arnoux Saint-Auban in France on 20 April, 1941. Venet started painting at the young age of ten and was invited to show works in the Salon de Peinture Péchiney in Paris at the age of eleven. In 1958 Venet studied at the municipal school for visual art in Nice for one year, followed by a stage design assistant post at the opera in Nice. After military service in Algeria, the twenty year old Venet began making gestural pictures and photography, which developed towards monochrome plate paintings of tar and asphalt, along with abstracts cardboard reliefs and photographs they dominated his early period of creation. As early as in 1963 he made his first abstract sculpture “Pile of Coal (Tas de charbon)“, which today is regarded a turning point in the artist’s creation. At the same time the artist experimented with the medium film in the 1960s and devised a ballet. In 1964 he participated in the Salon Comparaisons at the museum for modern art in Paris and showed, together with representatives of New Realism and Pop Art, his abstract cardboard reliefs. In the late 1960s the artist became increasingly occupied with Conceptual Art and followed schematic rational principles. In the examination of mathematic and physical questions, the focus of his works turned more and more on content rather than on form. A five-year creative break between 1971 and 1976 was used to engage in questions of art theory and to teach art and art theory at the Paris university Sorbonne. In 1976 he began to work again and first made paintings that are extremely reserved interpretations of geometric figures. A year later he showed works on documentea 6 in Kassel and in 1978 at the Biennale in Venice. In 1979 he made first wooden reliefs as well as the steel sculptures “Indeterminate Lines“.

The line became Bernar Venet‘s means of artistic expression and object of his steel sculptures, in which he examined the phenomena of space, time and motion, which is also obvious in this work. The clearest basic form is broken open and taken to a symbiosis of space and line that permeate one another. Additionally, he evokes a fascinating contrast by putting the form’s easiness side by side with the material’s monumentality.

Besides his activity as a sculptor, for which he became internationally acknowledged, he always stuck to painting, photography and film as well. Bernar Venet is among the most important international contemporary sculptors, his works are on display in numerous museums, private collections and public spaces. [KH/JG].