Jean‑Pierre Vasarely

Jean-Pierre Vasarely, aka Yvaral, was born in Paris in 1934. He was the son of Victor Vasarely, the Hungarian–French artist regarded as the founder of Op Art. Between 1950 and 1953 he studied graphic art and publicity at the École des Arts Appliqués in Paris. He married Michèle Taburno in the 1960s, who later became central to his artistic production, serving as the subject of a major body of digital portraits from the late 1970s onward.

Yvaral described his practice as “numerical art,” a systematic approach that applied algorithms, grids, and later computers to extend the logic of Op Art into digital processes. From the outset he was concerned with how perception could be activated through precise structure. His early work used abstract configurations to generate moiré effects, vibrations, and optical instabilities, establishing a visual language rooted in controlled variation. These investigations later expanded into computer-assisted methods, where photographic images were translated into pixel-like grids and geometric order became a field of dynamic transformation. In later decades his digitally processed portraits of Michèle Taburno, Marilyn Monroe, and Salvador Dalí exemplified this approach, transforming familiar faces into fields of geometric variation. 

In 1960 he co-founded Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) in Paris with Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, Francisco Sobrino, Horacio Garcia Rossi, Joël Stein, and Vera Molnár. The group rejected the figure of the solitary artist in favor of collective authorship and public participation. Their 1963 manifesto, Assez des mystifications, called for art that placed viewers in situations they could trigger and transform, shifting them from passive spectators to active participants. At the Paris Biennale that same year, GRAV presented its first Labyrinth, a collaborative environment of optical and kinetic devices that foreshadowed interactive installation. The group went on to present internationally, including documenta III in Kassel in 1964, The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965, and Lumière et Mouvement at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1967. GRAV was awarded the Gold Medal at the San Marino Biennale in 1963 before disbanding in 1968. 

Yvaral presented his first major solo exhibition in 1966 at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, a key venue for kinetic and technological art. Over the following decades his work was shown widely in Europe, the United States, and Asia, including selection to represent France at Artec ’90 in Nagoya, Japan. He received awards such as the Grand Prize for Visual Arts at the 1970 Paris Biennale and continued to be recognized internationally through the 1980s and 1990s, when his digitally processed portraits became emblematic of computer-assisted image-making. His pieces entered major collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Vasarely Foundation in Aix-en-Provence. Alongside his artistic practice, he also undertook high-profile design commissions, creating the Renault logo in the 1970s and the emblem for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.