Victor Vasarely

BYDealers Auction House Biography and Notes

During the 1960s, Victor Vasarely, a Hungarian artist naturalized French in 1961, enjoyed huge success and international recognition, as evinced by the many exhibitions devoted to his work and to optical-kinetic art in general. More significantly, Vasarely's historic exhibition The Responsive Eye, presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1965, was triumphant, earning him the moniker "the Pope of Op Art." The same year, he received the prestigious Grand Prix at the São Paulo Biennale. Starting in 1963, and more markedly in 1966, Vasarely wholly appropriated the use of colour, which literally exploded in his work. His approach was based on a system of solid-coloured geometric shapes conceived as modules that could be combined indefinitely. The pictorial units that govern these paintings form the "Plastic Alphabet," developed and patented by Vasarely; they consist of a simple coloured square, about 10 centimetres by 10 centimetres, in which is inserted a smaller geometrical figure - square, rectangle, triangle, circle, oval - of a different colour. These pictorial units then follow a specific colour palette - chrome yellow, emerald green, ultramarine blue, cobalt violet, red, gray - based on contrasts between white and black, positive and negative, lending themselves to an infinite number of variations and arrangements. "Their allocation allows for hot and cold colors, light and dark to alternate, of, giving rise to the appearance of an undulating surface. Vasarely multiplied variations, sought out contrasts, distorted the grid, rediscovered volume, played with perspective, hollowed out space, and was not afraid to use chiaroscuro" (Lemoine, ed., Vasarely: Hommage / Tribute, Silvana Editoriale, 2013).