VERA MOLNÁR
Vera Molnár is a Hungarian-French artist. Molnar is widely considered to be a pioneer of computer art and generative art. Born in Hungary, she studied aesthetics and art history at the Budapest College of Fine Arts. In the 1940s and 50s, she created non-representational paintings. By 1959 she had established a systematic method of creation and was making combinatorial images; in 1968 she would use a computer to create her first algorithmic drawings. To create the geometric images, she invented a series of exploratory steps and rules that aped a computer’s inputs and outputs, which allowed her to control the final imagery. This was a revolutionary approach to the use of technology, which made her one of the most important artists working with computers in this early stage.
In the 1960s she founded two groups in France concerned with the use of technology within the arts: the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel and Art et Informatique.
Vera Molnár’s work has had growing international recognition over the years. She has had solo-exhibitions at the Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen (2004), the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen (2007, 2012), Musée des Beaux-Arts, Budapest (2010), the Fondation Louis Moret, Martigny (2015), Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2015), and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen (2018). She has been included in group-shows world-wide, notably in Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury, MoMA New York (2020). She recently had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Digital Art, Zurich (2019) and Museum Ritter, Germany (2021). She was the winner of the first D.velop Digital Art Award (2005), was appointed Chevalier of Arts and Letters (2007), and won the outstanding merit award AWARE in 2018. In 2007, she was named a Chevalier of Arts and Letters in France.