Foreshadowing digital art: Victor Vasarely’s visual inventions

In this video, we encounter the visual inventions of 20th-century artist Victor Vasarely, as exhibited at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2019, in a retrospective show titled: ‘Le Partage des Formes’.

Born in Hungary in 1906, Vasarely is credited as the grandfather and leader of the Op Art movement and, as exhibition co-curator Arnaud Pierre explains, his oeuvre offered “a new visual language to the world”.

The artist utilised geometric shapes and colourful graphics to create illusions of spatial depth, while borrowing from influences that span Bauhaus design principles, Wassily Kandinsky and Constructivism.

After settling in Paris in 1930, Vasarely worked in advertising agencies to support himself as a graphic artist. During the Forties, he experimented in a style drawn from Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, before arriving at his hallmark checkerboard paintings.

His works are presently held in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

View the original video here.

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