Vera Molnár


Vera Molnár is a French media artist of Hungarian origin. She is considered to be a pioneer of computer art.

Life

Vera Molnar, born 1924 in Hungary, is one of the pioneers of computer and algorithmic arts. Trained as a traditional artist, Molnar studied for a diploma in art history and aesthetics at the Budapest College of Fine Arts. She iterated combinatorial images from as early as 1959. In 1968 she began working with computers, where she began to create algorithmic paintings based on simple geometric shapes and geometrical themes.

Work

Molnar created her first non-representational images in 1946. These were abstract geometrical and systematically determined paintings. In 1947 she received an artists’ fellowship to study in Rome at the Villa Giulia, and shortly after moved to France, where she currently resides.
In the 1960s, Molnar co-founded several artist research groups: GRAV, who investigate collaborative approaches to mechanical and kinetic art, and Art et Informatique, with a focus on art and computing. Molnar learned the early programming languages of Fortran and Basic, and gained access to a computer at a research lab in Paris where she began to make computer graphic drawings on a plotter, several of which are included in a 2015 retrospective exhibition in New York City called "Regarding the Infinite | Drawings 1950-1987".
Molnar is part of an exhibit, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century at the Museum of Modern Art, which demonstrates the history of drawing lines. In 2005 Molnar received the DAM Digital Arts Award for her life’s work, which includes €20,000 prize, and a cataloged exhibition. Vera Molnar’s exhibit, Ordnung.Ordre. at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv shows her early freehand drawings never exhibited before, from her late-1960s to the new installation at Museum Haus Konstruktiv.