Bernar Venet valuation

Bernar Venet was born in Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban, France, in 1941. He worked as a stage designer at the Nice Opera in 1959, and from 1961 made tar paintings, black monochromes and cardboard reliefs; Tas de charbon (Pile of Coal, 1963) was his first sculpture with no specific shape. He went to New York in 1966 and settled there, worked alongside Minimal and Conceptual artists including Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, and presented mathematical diagrams and formulas as works of art. After a pause from 1971 to 1976, when he taught art theory at the Sorbonne, he took part in Documenta VI in 1977, and from 1979 made wood reliefs of arcs, angles and straight lines and the first Indeterminate Lines. These led to his steel sculptures, the Arcs, Angles and Effondrements (Collapses), many of them monumental and in Corten steel. In 2011 he showed monumental sculpture at the Château de Versailles, and MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Centre Pompidou hold his work. He lives and works in Le Muy, where the Venet Foundation opened in 2014.

His work includes steel sculptures of every size, wood and steel reliefs, paintings, works on paper and prints. For a sculpture, a buyer will want to know whether it is unique or one of an edition, and how it has been stored and moved, since scratches, dents and unwanted rust change a steel surface. For a print, check the edition number, publisher and signature. A gallery invoice and the date of the work should go with it.