Vera Molnár

With Vera Molnár. Possibilities, the Kunstmuseum Basel offers insight into the printmaking oeuvre of the grande dame of computer art. The 28 editions on display, which include some multi-part works, were produced between 1991 and 2023 at the Atelier of Éditions FANAL in Basel.

Vera Molnár (1924–2023) was fascinated by what happens to a geometric form when one of its features is slightly altered. To make such alterations, in 1959 she began using her “machine imaginaire” to calculate the next steps of her compositions, one step at a time – in her head. It was not until 1968 that Molnár had the opportunity to work with a computer for the first time. The computational power of the machines enabled the artist to “systematically investigate all visual possibilities.” The computer remained an important tool for her formal experiments throughout her life. Her plotter drawings made her a pioneer of media art.

Geometric representations were already a prominent feature in Molnár’s work when the Budapest native moved to her adopted home of Paris in 1947, but she later claimed the impetus for her formal language came from the parallel lines she used to capture the architecture of Notre Dame Cathedral. The artist was particularly fond of working with the square. Its four sides, equal in length and at right angles to each other, convey great stability. Molnár deliberately disturbed this balance. Works such as Quatre carrés, quatre modes (1991) and the triptych Brèches (1987/1999) illustrate how shifting individual elements even very slightly can create more unstable arrangements.

Molnár's works were often inspired by the everyday impressions she sketched in her journals while traveling on a train or sitting in a café. She also devoted many pages of these diaries to landscape views, especially of Montagne Sainte-Victoire in Aix-en-Provence. This mountain ridge had been translated repeatedly by Paul Cezanne (1839–1906) into two-dimensional pictorial form using watercolors and oil paints. Molnár focused on the striking contours of the mountain. For her etchings Courbe Sainte-Victoire (2017), she broke down the landscape view with scientific precision into an intricate pattern of straight lines.

Molnár’s sketchbooks also contain studies of numbers and letters that served as the basis for prints such as En lignes en noir (2016), N en désordre (2016) or 85 (2009). The white triangles on a blue background in the screen-print series Triangles (2023), in contrast, seem at first like a rigorous geometric study. But in reality, these five compositions are based on the changing shapes made over the course of the day by light falling through the door of Molnár's room in her retirement home. In that context, the formal investigation takes on a poetic quality, and Molnár's work encourages attentiveness to one's own surroundings.