Three exhibits are currently underway in the region, celebrating the 110th anniversary of the birth of Hungarian-Franco artist Victor Vasarely.

Hungarian-Franco artist Victor Vasarely, the father of Op-Art, is being celebrated with a triptych of exhibitions in three Provençal sites: the Vouland Museum in Avignon, the Château de Gordes in Gordes, and the Vasarely Foundation in Aix-en-Provence.

Entitled “MultipliCité”, the summer event has been designed to present the creative process of Vasarely’s work, thanks to rarely seen original artworks that take the visitor on a journey through the work and life of the artist.

“My art transposes nature thus one more time, this moment right now, the one of physics that renders the world physically comprehensible”, Vasarely once said, and it is undeniable that his work has had a major impact on the way we now look at things.

Greatly influenced by the Bauhaus movement, where there was no hierarchy between the artistic disciplines of painting, sculpture and the applied arts, the painter, sculptor, and graphic designer started experimenting with shapes and shades in the late 1940’s, giving birth to a hard-edge and geometrical form of abstract art. Later on, in the 1960’s, he played with the distortion of lines, resulting in forms that appeared to be bulging out from the pieces, creating optical images that became part of the popular culture.

The first exhibition at Musée Vouland, “Victor Vasarely in motion”, compares the museum’s 17th and 18th century decorative arts to Vasarely’s own plastic universe.

The second exhibition at the Château de Gordes, focuses on the plastic alphabet that the artist invented, using circles, squares and triangles with contrasting colours to create an infinite number of units. The goal was to design a universal language understandable by all, as the third exhibit at the Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence, “Art for everyone”, clearly shows. It was with the idea of bringing together urban planners, artists and architects that Vasarely established the foundation that now bears his name. Placing art at the heart of the city, it is a unique interdisciplinary experimentation centre where “ the future takes shape in this new geometric polychromatic and solar city” and where plastic art is “kinetic, multi-dimensional and collective … most definitely abstract and inseparable from science.”

All three Victor Vasarely exhibits run until the 2nd of October. The Vouland Museum is Avignon is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00am to 6:00pm, the Château de Gordes in Gordes is open every day from 10:00am to 12:30pm and from 1:30pm to 6:00pm, and the Vasarely Foundation in Aix-en-Provence is open daily from 10:00am to 6:00pm.

The entrance fee varies between 7 € and 12 € and a pass for all three exhibitions can be purchased for 21 € (15 € for people under 26 years old and 9 € for children 5 to 15 years).

Lead image some rights reserved by tsevis via flickr (edited); used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 2.0