Vera Molnár Survey at Pompidou

The third landmark survey of a new media pioneer at a major global museum in the space of a month, the Centre Pompidou presented Speak to the Eye. Emblematic of an artist gaining recognition too close to passing, the show nonetheless was a welcome celebration of the grande dame of generative art, perhaps our most venerated figure—Vera Molnár.

The show spanned the legend’s career from early hand-drawn geometric abstractions—her machine imaginaire—to her sustained and forever-important serial algorithmic compositions. The show did well at demonstrating Molnár’s systematic emphasis—how she explored ideas and of form, order and controlled randomness throughout her life. It was obssession that would have resulted in a complete and storied practice with or without the computer. But the computer was the artist’s superpower and one of the loves of her life.

The exhibition even examined Molnár’s late experiments with AI-generated art, which she revealed to aurèce vettier.

The show at France’s preeminent modern art institution was a show befitting the career of an all-time great, not only in French, generative or digital art.

To mark the occasion, I wrote about “Molnár’s Paris.”