The artist's first exhibition in Taiwan
Indeterminate Radicality, Bernar Venet's first exhibition in Taiwan, presents thirty-four works on paper and sculptures made over the past two decades, several completed this year and shown here for the first time. The French conceptual artist lets the line off its leash. It sweeps, doubles back, knots itself, collapses. At Asia Art Center Taipei, from September 12 through November 22, the result is an alphabet with no words in it: Arcs, Angles, Indeterminate and Straight Lines, both ordered and in disorder, each meaning nothing but itself, and all the more radical for it.
Venet's titles read like laboratory notations, 222.5˚ Arc x 5, 84.5º Arc x 8, and that is the point. An arc, for Venet, is neutral: a monosemic unit of geometry, a measurement rather than a metaphor. Since the early 1960s, when he sprawled among refuse for Performance in Garbage (1961), painted with tar, and tipped out his landmark Pile of Coal (1963), a sculpture with no fixed form, only weight and consequence, Venet has worked to strip art of narrative, style, and even authorship. In New York after 1966, he exhibited mathematical diagrams and scientific texts as art in their own right: pure information, and, brilliantly enough, pure abstraction. He has likened his path since then to sleepwalking, a "combination of accidents and discoveries." The accidents are real. So are the discoveries.
The drawings in Indeterminate Radicality are where that philosophy gets physical. Executed in oilstick, charcoal, graphite, and collage, they are not studies for the monumental steel works but autonomous acts. The most direct record of the energy at the core of Venet's art. The Indeterminate Lines travel with a self-willed insolence, refusing predetermined form; the Collapsed Arcs let measured curvature give way to collapse, gravity signing the work alongside the artist. At the center hangs a monumental Ligne indéterminée of 2025, more than four meters wide: a single line that runs until it has exhausted every argument with itself. Around it, large-scale drawings from the Arcs and Indeterminate Line series, the recent Vertical Disorder pieces, and a suite of hand-colored screenprints from 2022 complete the vocabulary.
In three dimensions, the grammar turns mutinous. The sculptures, rolled steel, black or waxed patina, made between 2010 and 2026, range from the measured seriality of 222.5˚ Arc x 5 (2010) and 84.5º Arc x 8 (2017) to works in which order is deliberately surrendered: the Effondrement pieces, arcs capitulating under their own weight into low-slung nests; the bristling Acute Unequal Angles; the Vertical Disorder sculptures of 2026, whose bundled arcs rise in unstable, tented equilibrium. Notable among them is 47 Arcs / Désordre (2012–2026), an accumulation of arcs produced over fourteen years and released by the artist, into a single disorder. Whether in steel or in softer oilstick, the works build a porous architecture, and if they are accidentally beautiful, it is the beauty of things that were never asked to be.
The exhibition is a landmark occasion for audiences in Taiwan. Bernar Venet will travel to Taipei to attend the opening reception on September 12 to share the ideas that have carried him from tar and coal to mathematics and monumental steel.
BERNAR VENET: Indeterminate Radicality Exhibition
Dates: September 12 – November 22, 2026
Venue: Asia Art Center (Taipei), 1F, No. 128, Lequn 3rd Rd., Taipei, Taiwan
Opening Reception: 4:00pm, Saturday, September 12, 2026, the artist will be in attendance
About Bernar Venet
Born in 1941 in Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban, France, Bernar Venet emerged in the early 1960s as a radical voice of the postwar avant-garde, producing tar paintings, cardboard reliefs, and, in 1963, his landmark Pile of Coal, a sculpture without specific form. After moving to New York in 1966, he became a pioneer of conceptual art, presenting mathematical diagrams and scientific texts as art in their own right. Since the late 1970s his exploration of the line, indeterminate, straight, curved, broken – has unfolded across drawing, painting, sculpture, and monumental public installation. Landmark presentations include the installation of monumental Indeterminate Lines on the Champ-de-Mars (1994), Arcs on the Champs-Élysées (1999) and both at the Château de Versailles (2011), a major retrospective at the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon (2018–2019), and the Arc Majeur (2019) in Belgium, the largest public artwork in Europe. In 2024, Convergence: 54.5° Arc x 14, a permanent monumental sculpture commissioned for the Paris Olympic Games, was unveiled in Paris, and Beyond Concept and Matter, the most comprehensive retrospective of his work ever presented in China, opened at the Phoenix Center in Beijing before traveling to the Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, in 2025. His works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among many others. In 2014 he established the Venet Foundation. He lives and works in Le Muy, in the south of France.