FONDATION VASARELY - Exhibition VASARELY AVANT L’OP, European abstraction, 1945-1955 + Permanent collectionses

From  June 17th to October 15th, 2023 : Exhibition VASARELY AVANT L’OP, European abstraction, 1945-1955.

In the aftermath of the war, Victor Vasarely, who had been successful in advertising graphics since his arrival in France in 1930, decided to become a full-fledged artist. In the summer of 1944, in the exhibition “Vasarely ˗ dessins et compositions graphiques”, at the Denise René gallery, newly created at his instigation, he showed again the works whose painting he was to produce during the following years, and with which he was to take his place fully in the art world, seemed to put in abeyance the achievements. After having gone wrong with a kind of surrealism marked by the horrors of war and camps, Vasarely turned to an abstraction embodied in three main series, Belle-Isle, Gordes-Cristal and Denfert, which could nevertheless be combined, even if the artist cast a critical eye on these hybridisations which make the concept lose its purity by giving in to a guilty formal hedonism. How should we view these paintings which quickly assured Vasarely a place of choice on the Parisian scene, before the optic turn in his art ?

Inaugurated in 1976, the architectonic center of Aix-en-Provence reflects the essence of Vasarely’s mission. Designed as a place of exchange, experiments and new encounters, this multi-disciplinary “laboratory” would bring together plastic arts, architecture, new technologies, chemistry, and other disciplines. The ““polychromatic city of happiness” was born.

Designed by Vasarely in collaboration with architects Jean Sonnier, Dominique Ronsseray and Claude Pradel-Lebar, the 5,000 sq. meter building is an example of the very same urban design which the Foundation seeks to promote.

Sixteen hexagon-based modules are embedded in a gigantic building using technology and materials endorsed by modern art movements. The honeycomb structure presents various models of the integration of plastic arts and architecture, using optical art as its common ground.

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