Vera Molnár

In the 1960s, she founded two art groups in France concerned with the use of art and technology: the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel and Art et Informatique. Vera Molnár was born in Hungary, she studied aesthetics and art history at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. In the 1940s and 1950s, she created abstract paintings. In 1976, her first solo exhibition in the gallery of the London Polytechnic took place. Her work has been widely collected by major museums. In 2007, she was named a Chevalier of Arts and Letters in France. Molnár was selected as one of 213 artists for the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.

The recorded working language is French. The field of work recorded is digital art. Places of work recorded in the authority are Paris. Work by Vera Molnár is recorded in the collections of Hungarian National Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Musée National d'Art Moderne. Distinctions recorded are Prix Aware.

Vera Molnár, born in 1924 in Hungary, was one of the pioneers of computer and algorithmic arts. Trained as a traditional artist, Molnár studied for a diploma in art history and aesthetics at the Budapest College of Fine Arts, where she graduated in 1947, and where she met her future husband, François Molnár (1922–1993) a scientist, with whom she collaborated. For a short while in 1947 she lived in Rome, before moving to Paris that same year. In 1948, she married Molnár. Molnár 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. Molnár died on 7 December 2023, at the age of 99.

Molnár 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 resided until she died in Paris. In the 1960s, Molnár co-founded several artist research groups. The first, in 1960, was the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, which investigated collaborative approaches to mechanical and kinetic art. The second was Art et Informatique, with a focus on art and computing. Molnár learned the early programming languages of Fortran and BASIC, and gained access to a computer at a research laboratory in Paris where she began to make computer graphic drawings on a plotter.

Frac Lorraine, France Museum of Fine Arts Houston Museum of Modern Art, New York City Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch, Germany Morgan Library & Museum National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Tate, London Victoria and Albert Museum, London Kunstmuseum Reutlingen | konkret Los Angeles Country Museum of Art