Vera Molnár
abstract painter, 1924–2023, based in Paris, France.
Vera Molnar is an abstract painter and a pioneer of generative art. She was born in 1924 in Budapest, Hungary, where she studied at the Magyar Képzőművészeti Főiskola (Hungarian Fine Arts Academy) followed by a year at the Hungarian Academy in Rome. Along with her future husband, lifelong interlocutor, and occasional collaborator, François Molnar, as well as several art school classmates including Judit Reigl, Marta Pan, and Simon Hantaï, she settled in Paris in 1947, where she has lived and worked ever since.
In 1960, the Molnars co-founded the Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel, later known as GRAV, but left the group shortly thereafter. As her husband “quit” painting to become a perceptual psychology researcher, Vera Molnar developed the machine imaginaire, her imaginary computer, to generate series of drawings. From 1968 she had access to a mainframe electronic computer, an IBM system/370, and in 1976 she had her first solo exhibition, “Transformations,” at the Concourse Gallery, Polytechnic of Central London, featuring her computer graphics. Over the past two decades, her work has been the subject of several major museum exhibitions, mostly recently at the Espace de l’art concret , the Musée de Beaux-Arts , Rennes, and the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum . This year, Molnar was included in “ The Milk of Dreams ” at the Venice Biennale and has her first solo exhibition in the United States, “ Variations ,” at the Beall Center for Art + Technology in Irvine, California. She is recipient of the first d.velop digital art award (2005), a Légion d’Honneur, the highest French order of merit (2012), and the Prix AWARE (2018).
