Vera Molnar — True Story — Torri — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 7 → October 19, 2013

The exhibition presents old drawings in dialogue with a selection of recent paintings. True Story is the tale of an artistic trajectory — Vera Molnar’s from the 1950’s to the present day — but also Torri’s, who inaugurated it’s program in September 2010 with a solo show by the same artist.

Steeped in a pictorial tradition characteristic of Eastern Europe, Vera Molnar moved to Paris in 1947 to develop an experimental and deeply committed body of work. With this show, TORRI hopes to shed particular light on the series of eight drawings on paper dated from the end of the 1950’s. These graphite studies — never before exposed — come out of a reflection on the ancestral meander motif that recurs throughout the artist’s work. Vera Molnar works at the quintessential reduction of this archetypal theme by the transcription of solids containing as many interstices as impasses. The meander’s curve is reduced to its most extreme state of purity, while the composition invites the regard to loose itself in an endless wandering.

In counterpoint to these historic works, TORRI presents a selection of recent canvases, in dazzling red and white. In these deeply radical paintings, the elementary form of the square initiates a protocol of decomposition and rearrangement, according to a principle of intricate interlinking of pre-cut surfaces. Fragments of a red painting are superimposed on and overlap with each other, while leaving exposed white intervals of another square: that of the canvas beneath. The visitor will find here the continuation, in a pictorial format, of the original preoccupations of the artist perceptible in the meander drawings of the 1950’s: the notion of the interstice in particular, but also the labyrinthine path of the eye through the interlocking patterns of cut elements.

The exhibition True Story presents a new opportunity to encounter the work of Vera Molnar, but also marks the convergence of two itineraries, that of a gallery celebrating three years of existence, and that of an artist whose belated recognition has now been brilliantly confirmed.

— Laure Jaumouillé.

Laure Jaumouillé is an art historian and critic for the review 02. Most recently, she has published in Mouvement and Frog. Starting in September 2009, she worked on the Centre Pompidou Metz’s inaugural exhibition Chefs-d’oeuvres? under the direction of Laurent Le Bon, before joining the programming department as a director of research and exhibitions (Erre, variations labyrinthiques, Vues d’en haut). Since October 2012, she has followed the Experimentation in Art and Politics program at Sciences Po (Speap) while teaching cultural politics, focusing on the subject of international artistic dialogue, to Masters students in the cultural concentration of public affairs.