Vera Molnar

Vera Molnar searched for new forms of art

Vera Molnar was born in Budapest on 5th January 1924. Even as a child, she developed a systematically analytical view of her environment and carried out her first visual experiments in a playful manner. Consequently, her path led her to the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1942, where she studied art history, painting and aesthetics until 1947. During this time, her interest in geometric-constructive abstraction grew, and while still a student, she turned exclusively to non-representational and self-referential painting. After completing her studies, a scholarship enabled her to spend a short time in Rome, after which she settled in Paris. Her early work was influenced by the abstract art of Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian, but also showed traces of Russian Constructivism. Vera Molnar painted, collaged and photographed, but none of the tools available to her satisfied her artistic demands. She sought her own expression at a time when all artistic tradition was being questioned more than ever.

Visual art as systematic research

Vera Molnar understood her artistic work as research and spoke of wanting to systematically process her research series. To this end, she established rules that she only varied slightly. She initially worked according to the méthode imaginaire with squares filled with dots, which were constantly rearranged according to the premise postulated by the artist. The next step was the machine imaginaire, for which Molnar imagined a computer that she fed with a programme of her own devising, which executed all possible variations of a certain series of shapes to a limited extent. The idea became reality when Vera Molnar was given the opportunity to work with a real mainframe computer at the end of the 1960s, for which she wrote the MolnArt programme together with her husband François Molnar from 1974 to 1976 and which is regarded as a milestone in computer art. In the computer, she found the longed-for tool that enabled her to tap into the ‘unimaginable’ pictorial worlds she was looking for.

Successes and honours for unique achievements

Vera Molnar was one of the founding members of the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (GRAV) in 1960, the most important members of which included Francisco Sobrino, Julio Le Parc, Yvaral, Horacio Garcia Rossi, Joël Stein and François Morellet, and in 1967, was involved in the founding of the Art et Informatique group. From 1985 to 1990, she taught at the Sorbonne in Paris in the Department of Fine Arts and Art Studies. Vera Molnar has received prizes and honours for her pioneering work in the field of computer art. In 2005, she was the first recipient of the d.velop digital art award and was made a Chevalier de l'ordre de la Légion d'honneur in 2012. 

Vera Molnar lives and works in Paris.