Artists

Vera Molnár

Press release

Digital art pioneer Vera Molnár was born in Budapest in 1924 and resided in Paris from 1947 until her death on 7 December 2023 at the age of 99. 

Her incredibly creative, prodigious career is on display here, starting with her first drawings in 1946 through to a 2023 installation created specifically for this exhibition, and featuring an extensive body of works (paintings, drawings, photographs and wall installations) as well as selected extracts from her Diaries. These are conserved in state collections, mostly at the Musée national d’art moderne, thanks to the artist’s generosity. 

Her works, sustained by a knowledge of the psychology of shapes and the laws of vision, designed in a constructivist approach around 1947, became artistic interrogations of perspective. As a cybernetician and computer scientist, Molnár established what she called an "imaginary machine" in the 1960s, before becoming the first artist in France (1968) to produce digital drawings using a computer connected to a plotter. Up until the mid-90s, she engaged in systematic exploration of families of forms, showcasing their mutations while usually prioritising iteration and seriality.