With no fewer than four solo exhibitions last summer in France, Bernar Venet was everywhere in home country, from Nice’s Le 109 arts space, which showed a large selection of works made in 1963, to Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art, which focused on his conceptual period. At Meisenthal’s Halle Verrière, there was a show about his “Effondrements” (Collapses) sculptures, a grouping of Cor-Ten steel arcs piled on top of one other, and at the Musée Fabre, there was a presentation about how his works in dialogue with Gustave Courbet’s Realism and Pierre Soulage’s all-black abstract paintings. simplebet8

Across these presentations, it was evident that Venet is more than just the sculptor of the giant steel scultpures for which he is today best known. These sculptures have been shown in venues from Paris’s Centre Pompidou to Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art, but despite his international prominence, full Venet retrospectives have been rare—especially in France, where he has yet to have a full-dress show on the scale that he has in other countries.

This week, in Venice, in a show held in to coincide with the opening of the Biennale, Venet will exhibit objects related to some of his earliest conceptual artworks, from the early 1960s, he recently inked a representation deal with the Bigaignon gallery, which will specifically show his photography, a lesser-seen part of his work. Meanwhile, the Paris 2024 committee, the group that facilitates art commissions tied to the Olympics, has commissioned Venet to create a work to make one of his steel arcs for a site in a park near the Stade de France and Saint Denis’s Olympic Aquatic Center, the only building that has been constructed specially for the games this summer.

As an artist who’s worked in many different mediums, Venet said in an interview that he defies labels. “My work is not about immediate seduction,” he explained. “It’s a language that needs to be learnt. One must understand the logic of an artwork in order to fully appreciate it. I am always looking for the right equation, solution, which convinces rather than persuades.

“Why limit oneself to one idea, when there is so much to be created?” the 82-year-old artist continued. “Sure, there is a constant in my exploring the line, but I try to take it to different places.” simplebet8

Born in the south of France in 1941, Venet initially showed a taste for drawing and painting, not sculpture. At age 11, he chanced upon a book on Pierre-Auguste Renoir. As he was turning the pages, it hit him: art would be his reason to live.

He moved toward sculpture in 1961 while he was serving in the military. “In the 1960s, abstract art was over,” Venet recalled. “Pop art and New Realism and Narrative Figuration prevailed. No one wanted my tar paintings or my Pile of Coal,” a famed 1963 sculpture that is exactly what its title says.

That year was the one Venet began to forge an artistic connection that would help sustain his career. Through the artist Ben, Venet met the sculptor Arman in 1963. Venet sold a work that Arman the latter had gifted him, to pay for his first plane ticket to New York City, where he was introduced to Minimalist art. Arman continued to support him, giving him one dollar every day to buy some food and water, until he forgot all about Venet for an entire weekend. The artist remembers that weekend fondly. simplebet8