Biography
Waddington Custot is pleased to present ‘When Steel Dreams of Code’, a solo exhibition of 12 new generative artworks by celebrated French conceptual artist Bernar Venet (b.1941, Château-Arnoux, France).
Marking a major milestone in Venet’s six-decade-long practice, this exhibition introduces his first use of artificial intelligence in art making. Though new in process, these pieces extend Venet’s continued investigation into systems of disorder, entropy and authorship. ‘When Steel Dreams of Code’ will be the first presentation of Venet’s Generative Angles Paintings in the UK, and will coincide with London Gallery Weekend.
Bernar Venet is an artist internationally recognised for his conceptual approach. A major figure in the 1960s New York avant-garde, with works in the collection of MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Hirshhorn, and the Centre Pompidou, amongst many more, the artist has long used the conceptual languages of mathematics, science and philosophy to interrogate the boundaries of art. Later making monumental sculptures in steel, he is also known for performative acts in which steel motifs – lines, arcs, and angles – are toppled and left where they fall: a spontaneous outcome within controlled parameters.
Rather than a departure, Venet’s turn to generative art is a natural evolution of this spontaneous practice. While generative art today is often linked to recent advances in digital technology and algorithms, its underlying principles – chance, entropy, and systematic variation – have been central to Venet’s practice since the 1960s, seen in the sculptural ‘Pile of Coal’ (1963), to his Déchet and Goudron paintings (1961–1963), to his ‘Performance in Garbage’ (1961).
In a 1967 essay by the artist, Venet famously rejected the idea of style as an artistic signature in favour of content. He favoured a non-expressive approach to art, giving more importance to the concept than to the aesthetic of an artwork, not interested in problems of form, colour and material. This concept continues to shape Venet’s multidisciplinary approach. Venet applies consistent conceptual qualities – such as the use of minimalist materials and structural simplicity – to express conceptual consistency across sculpture, painting, photography, and now, for the first time, code.
“I’ve always resisted the idea of style as an artistic signature,” Venet reflects. “My goal has been to privilege content over appearance, using whatever materials or techniques best express the idea, whether that’s black pigment, cardboard, steel, or now, code.”
These new works, the Generative Angles Paintings, originate from digital images created in collaboration with a team of coders. The artist uses algorithms to generate variations of the recurring motif of the angle: a central form in his practice since the 1970s. For Venet, angles – two lines sharing a single point – represent a rare form of visual purity. Unlike abstract or figurative imagery, which may carry multiple interpretations, angles belong to the language of mathematics: they are monosemic, or, singular in meaning. The digital compositions are then printed onto canvases that have been hand-painted by Venet.
The Generative Angles Paintings extend his renowned Accident and Collapse series, where straight lines, arcs and angles made of steel are toppled and piled on top of each other, with gravity deciding their final form. In these works, Venet substitutes gravity for artificial intelligence. Through this process, the artist has been able to supercharge conceptual ideas of content and autonomy, with the algorithm providing infinite variations of the angle motif, capitalising on randomness within controlled parameters. The work continues his conceptual exploration of control and authorship, allowing works to generate themselves autonomously. Generative Angles Paintings series is in constant dialogue with the artist’s pictorial work, underscoring that in his exploration of the physical and digital realms, each inspires the other.
The exhibition marks Venet’s second solo show at Waddington Custot, following his 2022 exhibition ‘Hypotheses’, which also focused on his Angles series. ‘When Steel Dreams of Code’ continues this radical inquiry at a moment of growing debate around ethics, creativity and authorship that come with these new forms of technology.
Photo credit: Jerome Cavaliere
