Vera Molnár

Vera Molnár was born in Budapest in 1924. She studied painting, art history, and aesthetics at the Budapest College of Fine Arts from 1942 to 1947, creating landscapes and figural subjects before making her first non-representational works in 1946. During her studies she was introduced to modern art by her French teacher François Gachot, who smuggled banned books into Hungary. Reproductions of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire and Matisse’s Romanian Blouse opened a way forward, showing her how form and structure could carry weight without representation. At the same time she discovered James Joyce, reading Ulysses in a borrowed French edition. His use of fragmentation and permutation confirmed her sense that composition could be driven by systems and variation, a logic that would later define her own methods. In 1947 she received a French fellowship to study in Rome and soon after settled in Paris with the artist François Molnár. She became part of the postwar artistic circles in Montparnasse, meeting Brancusi, Vasarely, Léger, and Kandinsky. Alongside her artistic career she later taught aesthetics and art history at the Université de Paris I, Sorbonne, from 1985 to 1990.

Her work grew from simple abstract forms into systems shaped by order and chance. In the late 1940s and 1950s she pursued geometric abstraction with a focus on reduction and clarity, creating compositions built from circles, squares, and half-circles. She soon introduced small variations and disruptions, testing how a structure could shift through repetition or the play of symmetry. From these experiments she developed the idea of the machine imaginaire, a method of setting rules and constraints that guided the making of an image as if it were executed by a machine. This conceptual framework became the basis for her later practice. In 1960 she joined Horacio Garcia-Rossi, Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, Francisco Sobrino, Joël Stein, and Jean-Pierre Yvaral in founding GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), where she explored collective approaches to kinetic and optical art. The group sought to replace the idea of the solitary artist with anonymous, collaborative activity and to involve the spectator directly through interactive labyrinths and environments. In 1967 she co-founded Art et Informatique at the Institut d’Esthétique et des Sciences de l’Art in Paris, and the following year gained access to a computer at the Sorbonne, where she began creating algorithmic drawings.

Working at the Sorbonne and often in collaboration with programmer partners, Molnár became one of the first artists in France to create algorithmic plotter drawings. She worked with grids, lines, and squares, then disrupted them with small shifts and irregularities to see how a structure could fracture under pressure. Over time she refined this dialogue between order and disorder, producing serial works such as À la recherche de Paul Klee in 1969–70, Transformations in 1976, and Molnaroglyphes in 1977–78. For her, the computer was never the subject but a collaborator, extending what she called her machine imaginaire into real code. She described the process as a conversation between intuition and system, where chance and even programming errors revealed unexpected solutions. This carried through to her late practice, from polyptychs and letter-based studies to her first NFTs, including 2% de désordre en coopération in 2022 and Themes and Variations in 2023, created in collaboration with Martin Grasser.

Celebrated as an early artist of generative and algorithmic art, Molnár continued working into her late years before passing away in Paris in 2023.