Published by Verlag für moderne Kunst. Edited by Martin Engler. Text by Valerie Hillings, Michel Gauthier, Jana Baumann.
Cofounder of op art, Victor Vasarely (1906–97) forged a bridge between interwar abstractionism and the postwar avant-gardes with a vast oeuvre spanning more than six decades and incorporating all manner of styles and influences. Vasarely began his career in advertising as a graphic designer, and his art blurred the boundaries between the fine and applied arts—between, for example, a panel painting and a poster.
Assembling 120 works from both European and US collections, and published for a major European survey, Victor Vasarely: In the Labyrinth of Modernism traces the roots and genesis of this often-misrepresented artist based on key pictures and objects, arguing for an alternative vision of 20th-century art history in terms of both genealogy and genre.
Published by Silvana Editoriale. Edited by Serge Lemoine. Foreword by Pierre Vasarely. Text by Domitille d'Orgeval, François Morellet, Serge Lemoine, Julio Le Parc, Marianne Le Pommeré, Vera Molnar, Vincent Baby.
Long before there were such terms as Op art or Kinetic art, Victor Vasarely (1906–1997) was making abstractions that dazzled the eye with their chromatic boldness and energetic geometries. His painting "Zebra," of 1930, is widely considered the first work of Op art. The Hungarian-born Vasarely settled in Paris in 1930, working as a graphic designer (a calling whose requirement for clarity and precision permeated his art). From early on, Vasarely favored biomorphic shapes, sharp edges, two-dimensional space and a limited palette, but it was in the early 1950s that his canvases began to articulate the extreme rigor for which he became famed. In the 1960s he pursued printmaking, in an effort to make his work more democratically available. With almost nothing on this Op art pioneer currently in print, this volume offers an important opportunity to rediscover Vasarely’s rich and radically modern art.
Vasarely