Bernar Venet, 1961-2021 60 years of sculpture, painting & performance

On view from January 29, 2022 in Berlin, this dive into all facets of the internationally acclaimed French artist’s 60-year oeuvre will showcase over 150 works across the 8,000-square-meters of the reappropriated Tempelhof Airport’s hangars 2 and 3.

January 29 – May 30, 2022

Bernar Venet, 1961—2021. 60 Years of Sculpture, Painting & Performance is the internationally renowned French artist’s largest and most comprehensive retrospective in the world to date, spanning the entirety of his complex and widely diverse oeuvre as a sculptor, painter, performance artist – and radical conceptual artist. The exhibition will bring together over 150 works, reflecting the artist’s uncompromising approach and natural obsession in constantly shaping his environment through his art. On view from January 29 – May 30, 2022, the show is the first in a series of exhibitions to unfold over the next two years across the spectacular 8,000 sqm hangars 2 and 3 of Berlin’s emblematic Tempelhof Airport.

Organized by the Stiftung für Kunst and Kultur, curated by Walter Smerling, Bernar Venet, 1961—2021 charts the trajectory of the artist’s career from his very beginnings in his studio, which form the cornerstone of a body of work that has repeatedly called itself into question. The most frequently exhibited French sculptor to date, Venet has consistently affirmed his concept of art as an attitude which extends far beyond the formal and the spatial. His aspirations to this day are firmly rooted in the unbounded desire to simply never accept the world as it is, instead lending it his own perspective.

Unerringly direct, calculating, convinced of the emotionality and of the intention to symbiotically marry his existence with his creative aspirations, Venet once again renders his ultimately deeply optimistic desire to reinvent art and to alter his viewer’s perception of it.