Plastic units. Circa 1978. Wool carpet
As an extension of the Universe exhibition (January 14 – March 27, 2022) in London, in collaboration with Selfridges and Paco Rabanne, the Vasarely Foundation is presenting its first NFT series of 12 unique works by Victor Vasarely representing monumental works of art from his collection, in the form of digital tokens, with most of the proceeds going to the institution.
With this project, the Vasarely Foundation becomes the first French cultural foundation to create NFTs. The sale will start on April 12; a redirection link will be present on the home page of our website.
Through shapes, colours and trompe-l’oeil, Victor Vasarely’s poetic and geometric universe can shake your senses. During this workshop visit, you will be introduced to abstract art and to the poetic genre, the haiku, a short poem born in Japan in the 17th century. It invites the writer to record his or her emotions about the moment, his or her astonishment or wonder. Abstraction and poetry become child’s play.
On Wednesdays we offer you a different kind of fun! You can build a unique sculpture by answering the questions in our great treasure hunt. Each correct answer will earn you a piece of a 3D puzzle, which you can use to build your sculpture. In this workshop, you will learn about perspective and the creation of volume in space, the basics for becoming a budding architect.
Thursday 14th April .
Photography – © Farkas Andras
In 1986, the artist Pierre Buraglio produced a series of eight large drawings after Cezanne entitled the Sainte-Victoires of Z. Faire avec, d’après, autour, selon. Like Vasarely’s V-shaped sculpture, these drawings are not copies of Cézanne’s Sainte-Victoire mountain, but they give back to this landscape its power as a motif which Pierre Buraglio tries to exhaust through repetition. A kind of architecture appears in them, a purity made up of lines and superimposed layers which little by little erases the subject in favour of an idea of the mountain. These drawings, which reveal three points of view on Sainte Victoire, show its exceptional presence and also, in a way, its absence.
Photography – © Anne Fourès
A genius of optical illusion, Victor VASARELY (1906-1997) invented a whole area of artistic creation in the second half of the 20th century. From the first deformations of sinuous lines to polychrome geometries with complex illusions, his plastic research constitutes a masterful kinetic conquest whose influence is immense. But before becoming the father of Op Art, Vasarely studied medicine at the University of Budapest for a while. From 1927 onwards, he traced his artistic path, joining the Poldini-Volkmann Academy, then the Muhëly Academy, the “Bauhaus of Budapest” directed by Sándor BORTNYIK (1893-1976), who was steeped in the teaching of ALBERS and MOHOLY-NAGY.
«At auctions, masterpieces are exchanged for safes for fabulous sums of money… at the same time as people’s consciences come to terms with the construction of cubic deserts, known as H.L.M. »
Victor Vasarely, extract from Plasti-Cité, 1961
The Vasarely Foundation, 50 years of the future
until May 8
Edited by Denise René and Hans Mayer, Kröner workshop 394 x 100 cm (x2) Fondation Vasarely, Aix-en-ProvenceNFT
Cultural mediation
Upcoming spring holiday workshops
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Treasure hunt & “3D Puzzle” workshop
“Butterflies”
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Vasarely represents butterflies in his own way, with complementary colours and geometric shapes. Now it’s your turn to invent a new kind of butterfly using a palette of primary and complementary colours.
Concert on 9 April at 7pm
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In Europe, they have performed at the Berlin Philharmonic, the Frankfurt Opera House, the Cité de la Musique in Paris and the Palace of Arts in Budapest, as well as in a multitude of venues and festivals. Monika Lakatos, the famous singer of this group, became the first ever Roma artist to receive the prestigious WOMEX (World Music Expo) award for lifetime achievement.
Interview between
Pierre Buraglio and Bernard Collet
Thursday 28 April from 7pm
Faced with the presence of the Sainte Victoire, Vasarely’s V. continues the permanence of the motif and its variations that Cézanne sought in the 80 portraits he made of the mountain, 80 times this inverted V, which invites us to wonder if, in a certain way, Vasarely might not have rediscovered the gesture of Cezanne.Pierre Buraglio was born in Charenton in 1939. In 1959, he entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. From 1963 to 1965, he spent time in New York. From 1976, he taught at the regional school of Fine Arts in Valence and then, after having been a guest artist, he was appointed professor at the ENSBA in Paris.
Tinged with abstraction and figuration, Buraglio’s work explores interdisciplinarity and the links between form and meaning in contemporary aesthetics. His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions abroad: New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Seoul. His work has recently been shown at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, the Chapelle des Gobelins, the Galerie Ceysson et Bénétière in Luxembourg. In 2019 a retrospective of his work will be shown at the MAMC Musée d’Art Moderne et contemporain in Saint Etienne.
Bernard Collet is a writer and art critic. He is the author of novels, artists’ monographs and curates numerous exhibitions. Since 2018, he has been in charge of the artistic programming of the contemporary art centre La Halle des bouchers in Vienne. He has shown Pierre Buraglio’s work regularly since 1989 in France and abroad. He is the author of Buraglio/ Le Caravage, Le deuxième regard published by Jean-Pierre Huguet in 2011, based on Buraglio’s 1990 drawing after… Caravaggio’s The Fall of Saint Paul.
Artmarket com: Victor Vasarely, the strategy of the Multiple
The Foundation obtains compensation
Beaux Arts Magazine – April 2022
In 2021, the Vasarely Foundation celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its recognition as a public utility (September 27, 1971) by symbolically reuniting in a double exhibition the very places where it was created, the Château de Gordes and the Centre architectonique d’Aix-en-Provence.
This fiftieth anniversary exhibition retraces Victor Vasarely’s first thoughts on his grand design and the stages in the realisation of a cultural project that was unique at the time, from the written formulation of 1966, “My Foundation Project”.
For Victor Vasarely, an emulator of the Bauhaus, whose teachings he followed at the Mühely in Budapest between 1928 and 1930, aesthetics is also an ethic, and the objective assigned to the Foundation is indeed that of “changing life”: the beauty that only a few had been able to afford until now can now be made available to all. Thanks to technological advances resulting from interdisciplinary research, the production of “multiples”, and the integration of art into architecture, art will become a common treasure in the “Polychrome City of Happiness”.
“We decided (my wife and I) to found and maintain institutions of public utility… Considering that it is more noble to give to everyone than to monopolise everything for oneself and one’s relatives… In short, I bequeath the essence of my creations to the community, best represented in the end by the State of always. The work as a whole must be a common treasure of public utility, not the property of individuals scattered around the world. I am aware that I have developed, with the help of my own plastic language, not only a contemporary environment, a style par excellence, but also a new ethic, an ideal – so necessary – at a time when all the gods of the past are dying out.
Text by Victor Vasarely My Project, 1972. Catalogue of the exhibition
Six of the NFTs in this collection are digital transcriptions of certain integrations of the architectural centre that are to be restored. The 6 works to be restored will be coded with a smart contract programmed to refresh the design metadata to reflect the progress of the restoration of these integrations, directly on the NFT.
Monday 11 April
The poetry of geometric shapes
Wednesday 13 April
How big is the biggest butterfly your eyes have ever seen? From the monumental work Sonora, created in 1973.
Mónika Lakatos and the musicians of the Romengo group have mastered Hungarian and gypsy music like their mother tongue. The Romengo group has always combined tradition and modernity. In addition to the traditional melodies of the gypsy repertoire, of which they are virtuosos, they play their own songs and are constantly searching for new sounds. Alongside the percussion and violin solos, Mónika is the soul of this Hungarian group: her vibrato moves her listeners deeply. The artists have been acclaimed as far away as South Korea, India and Mexico.