Vera Molnár posthumous retrospective at the Centre Pompidou

2024

Artists: Vera Molnár, Vincent Baby (curator) · Year: 2024 · Medium: Retrospective exhibition · Substrate: Centre Pompidou, Galerie 4, 28 February – 26 August 2024 · Place: Paris, France · Institution: Centre Pompidou The Centre Pompidou opened "Vera Molnár — Parler à l'œil" ("Speaking to the Eye") on 28 February 2024 as the institution's first major retrospective of Molnár's work, three months after her death on 7 December 2023. The exhibition had been planned during Molnár's lifetime with her active participation; she had reviewed the curatorial selections in late 2022 and early 2023 but did not live to see the opening. Curator Vincent Baby produced the exhibition with the cooperation of Molnár's son François and the artist's studio archive. The exhibition assembled approximately 200 works across Molnár's seven-decade career, organized chronologically from her 1947 Budapest student work through her 1959 Machine Imaginaire conceptual experiments, the 1968 Interruptions and 1970s plotter works that established her international reputation, the 1980s color-plotter expansions, and her final 2010s-2020s digital and NFT releases (including the 2022 Sotheby's Themes and Variations). The exhibition closed 26 August 2024 after substantial critical and visitor reception. The retrospective is in this archive as the institutional capstone to Molnár's career — the first comprehensive view of a single first-generation computer artist's complete arc, presented at the institution that had been her principal home for five decades. The Pompidou had collected Molnár continuously since 1976 and held more than 70 of her works at the time of the retrospective; the exhibition drew on this institutional holding plus loans from the DAM Museum Berlin, the Fondation Cartier, the Tate, and several private collections. The exhibition catalogue (published by Pompidou Editions, 2024) is the most-comprehensive single document of Molnár's practice in print. The retrospective's reception was substantially positive across French and international art press; the exhibition has been frequently cited in subsequent critical writing as the moment at which the contemporary-art establishment institutionally completed its acknowledgment of first-generation computer art's significance. Lore Vincent Baby had worked with Molnár directly during exhibition preparation in 2022-23 and reportedly spoke with her by phone weekly during the planning period. Molnár's death three months before the opening transformed the exhibition's institutional weight — what had been planned as a substantive late-career honor became a posthumous tribute, with substantial public emotional resonance. The opening ceremony on February 28 was attended by Molnár's son François and several of her longtime Parisian artistic-circle figures (including the curator Charlotte Cosson and several of her DAM Berlin collaborators). The exhibition's design — Pompidou's standard high-ceiling gallery space, with substantial Molnár plotter drawings displayed at scale — has been substantively praised. Subsequent traveling iterations of the retrospective opened at the DAM Museum Berlin (2024-25) and at the Carré d'Art Nîmes (2025). Sources • Centre Pompidou — "Vera Molnár — Parler à l'œil" (exhibition catalogue, 2024). • Le Monde — Pompidou Molnár retrospective coverage (February-March 2024).