Vera Molnar Co-Founds Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel, (later Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV))

Playing a significant role in the development of Kinetic and Op Art, the Parisian collective aimed to explore the relationship between art, science and technology to create works that empirically engaged with new materials and challenged traditional notions of art.

The fusion of science and art would be a pivotal feature of computer art as well as digital generative art.

Founded by Hector García Miranda, Horacio García Rossi, Hugo Demarco, Julio Le Parc, Vera Molnár, François Molnár, François Morellet, Sergio Moyano, Servanes (Simone Revoil), Joël Stein, Francisco Sobrino, and Yvaral (Jean-Pierre Vasarely), Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel was “a center for visual research where the artists could work together towards the realization of their common formal and theoretical goals.

In the summer of 1960, the young artists rented a small garage in the Marais district of Paris, which provided them with a common meeting and exhibition space.”

The group would change its name to Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) in July 1961. GRAV artists used light, motion and other perceptual elements to create immersive and interactive artworks that required the viewer’s participation. These would all be crucial concepts to the development of electronic art.

Their work explicitly built upon the ideas of Victor Vasarely’s Yellow Manifesto., while implicitly building upon previous, even more radical movements such as Gutai in Japan and Allan Kaprow’s happenings in New York.

Further, Vera Molnar’s time as a member of GRAV was instrumental in shaping her approach to art. While she was initially focused on traditional forms of art such as painting and drawing, her time with GRAV exposed her to new techniques and approaches to art-making.

Through her involvement with the group, Molnar became interested in exploring the relationship between art and technology, which would lead her later in the decade to experiment with computer-generated images. She began creating algorithmic art using early computer programming languages such as FORTRAN. Although she had a disposition toward abstraction since childhood, her work became increasingly focused on the use of geometry and pattern.

Molnar’s time with GRAV also had an impact on her aesthetic sensibilities, influencing her interest in the use of repetitive forms, simple shapes and bold colors. She continued to explore these themes in her later computer-generated artworks, creating intricate and mesmerizing geometric patterns that play with the viewer’s perception, beginning in 1968.

Overall, Molnar’s time with GRAV helped to shape her approach to art and technology, which along with her concept of the “Machine Imaginaire” (Imaginary Computer) led to her becoming one of the great pioneers of computer-generated art.

From the Bright Moments Buenos Aires Timeline Poster:

Argentine painters Horacio García Rossi and Julio Le Parc, alongside luminaries like François Morellet and Vera Molnár, founded the Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel, renamed GRAV in 1961, the profoundly important collective that helped bridge the analog and digital art worlds as part of the New Tendencies movement. Initially, the group was rooted in op and kinetic art, two critical predecessors of electronic art. Like Mac Entyre’s Pintura Generativa, the group aimed to liberate art from the static canvas.