The Franco-Hungarian artist Vera Molnar was born in Budapest (Hungary) in 1924.A pioneer in the use of computers in artistic creation, Vera Molnar turned to geometric abstraction, working on form, its transformation and displacement from the 1950s onwards. As a true visual artist, she explored the line, the square, white, black, greys, blues and reds, bringing out the unexpected and imaginary freedom through a series of transformations of form worthy of scientific...

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  Biography of Vera Molnar

  The Franco-Hungarian artist Vera Molnar was born in Budapest (Hungary) in 1924.
  A pioneer in the use of computers in artistic creation, Vera Molnar turned to geometric abstraction, working on form, its transformation and displacement from the 1950s onwards. As a true visual artist, she explored the line, the square, white, black, greys, blues and reds, bringing out the unexpected and imaginary freedom through a series of transformations of form worthy of scientific experimentation.
  ‘The art of painting begins on the retina, first that of the painter, then that of the viewer.... Art must be human, that is to say, it must conform to human nature,’ she writes.
  After spending some time in Rome, she moved to Paris in 1947. She met Jesús Rafael Soto, Sonia Delaunay and François Morellet, and turned away from figurative art in favour of geometric abstraction. In search of objectivity, and collaborating with François Molnar, her husband, her work became experimental. Together, they participated in the creation of the CRAV (Centre de recherches d'art visuel, predecessor of the GRAV) in 1960, before leaving the group, embarrassed by the insufficiently scientific aspect of the research of the other members.Vera Molnar described herself as French and an abstract painter, part of the trend that belongs to constructive art in its most consistent and radical sense: that of systematic art, to which she has been committed since 1950.The artist took part in all the debates that animated the birth of kinetic art and led to the creation of La Nouvelle Tendance. From 1968 onwards, Vera Molnar became one of the pioneers in the use of computers in artistic creation.She has never been interested in the representation of nature, and when she tries to explain the real reasons for her choice to work solely with these forms, it is because, she says, ‘the simplicity of these forms still moves her’. Her experimentally-driven art is concerned with form, its transformation, displacement and perception. Her work is accompanied by intense theoretical reflection on the means of creation and the mechanisms of vision. It has its origins in Mondrian, Malevitch and the Zurich Concretes, and finds numerous correspondences in all the work carried out in relation to the exact sciences and mathematics in particular.For others, the work might seem systematic or even ‘mechanical’, but in reality its aim is to bring out the unexpected, freedom and the imaginary. The lines, for example, become ‘extravagant’, as the titles of some of the paintings tell us.Despite the apparent repetition and symmetry of her works, which use simple shapes - the square being Véra Molnar's preferred form - she incorporates an element of chance and disorder. With humour and irony, she pays homage to the masters of geometric abstraction such as Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevitch. Bored by the square, Véra Molnar turned to the letter M, like the initial of her name and ‘like Malevitch’, this ‘almost square’ shape allowing her to play with the codes of abstraction.Living in Paris since 1947, she died in 2023, on the eve of her 100th birthday.

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