Vera Molnár valuation

Vera Molnár (1924–2023) was born in Hungary, studied art history and aesthetics at the Budapest College of Fine Arts, graduating in 1947, and settled in Paris the same year; in 1948 she married the scientist François Molnár, with whom she worked. After abstract paintings in the 1940s and 1950s she began, by 1959, to work through systematic permutations of simple geometric forms by hand, following sets of rules she called her machine imaginaire. She co-founded the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel in 1960 and Art et Informatique in 1967, and in 1968 gained access to a computer at a Sorbonne research laboratory, taught herself Fortran and began making drawings with a pen plotter: squares, lines and grids in endless variations, with a deliberate measure of disorder, sometimes one per cent, let in to see where art appears. The letter M, for Malevich, Mondrian and Molnár, became a recurring sign. She was one of the first women to make art with a computer, and was in Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA in London in 1968.

Her plotter drawings of the late 1960s to the 1980s, signed and dated, are the most sought after, alongside paintings, works on paper and prints, and the date, the series, among them Interruptions and (Des)Ordres, and the technique should be established, since later drawings and prints exist from the same programs. Plotter ink on paper is light-sensitive, so works should be framed and hung out of strong light. Thaddaeus Ropac represents her estate.