Happy birthday to a pioneer of computer art - Vera Molnar!

Today we want to wish a very happy birthday to pioneer artist Vera Molnar! Born in Hungary in 1924, Vera Molnar is one of the first women artists to use computers in her practice.

Image credits: www.veramolnar.com

‘After studying at the Budapest Academy, she received her diploma in 1947 in Art History and Aesthetics. Her artwork has always been focused on abstract and geometrical paintings.

In 1960, Molnar co-founded the “Groupe de recherche d’art visuel” , or GRAV. This group was a proponent of stripping the content away from the visual image in their medium in order to focus on seeing and perceiving. They were instrumental in the Op-art and Kinetic Art movements of that decade.

According to Molnar, in her eyes, her work has a hypothetical character. In order to systematically process her research series, she invented a “technology”, which she called “Machine Imaginaire”. She sketched a program, and then, step by step, realized a simple, limited series, which was self-contained

In 1968 she discovered the power of the computer to allow an artist to step away from “the social thing” in order to get at the real creative vision. She replaced the illusory computer, the invented machine, by the genuine computer. Her initial work involved transformations of geometric objects, such as a square, by rotating, deforming, erasing all or parts of them, or replacing portions with basic elements of other geometric shapes. She would often repeat the geometric primitives while fracturing or breaking them as she transformed them, ultimately outputting them to a plotter.’
(text credits: COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND COMPUTER ANIMATION: A RETROSPECTIVE OVERVIEW, Chapter 9.2).

In 2019 Kate Vass Galerie has exhibited one of her work as part of the extensive group show Automat und Mensch; The exhibition was, above all, an opportunity to put important work by generative artists spanning the last 70 years into context by showing it in a single location.

Comprehensive catalogues from the exhibition can be found here.

Here a selection of some of our favourites works from Vera Molnar catalogue raisonné, which you can also fully discover on her website: www.veramolnar.com.

Image Credits: www.veramolnar.com