BERNAR VENET

Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2017

"In 1966 Bernar Venet went to New York for the first time... Later in the year he moved there for good. What convinced him was a kind of revelation which occurred at the Whitney Museum of American Art... He attended an exhibition of contemporary American sculpture. This was 'The Jean and Howard Lipman Collection,' including works by Donald Judd... Venet remembers keenly the 'shock' of the work. .which forced him to the surprising realization that 'my intentions were closer to those of the American artists than to the Europeans.' It was specifically the work of Minimal artists he was referring to, with their insistence no industrial inexpressiveness and their focus on the surface rather than the interior, in a rejection of implied depths in favor of a perceived and present surface."

Thomas McEvilley, Bernar Venet, Bern 2002, p. 19.