Vera Molnár

Vera Molnár was a Hungarian-born artist who trained at the art academy in Budapest and settled in Paris in 1947. In 1959 she began making compositions by hand from simple rules she called a "machine imaginaire," an imaginary machine. In the early 1960s she co-founded the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (GRAV), and in 1967 she founded the group Art et Informatique. In 1968 she gained access to a computer at a university research laboratory in Paris and began drawing with a plotter. The Centre Pompidou calls her the first artist in France to make drawings this way.

Her plotter series work through families of lines and squares. In (Des)Ordres (1974) she set her program to disturb rows of concentric squares at random. The V&A holds that series and Interruptions (1969), one of her earliest computer drawings. Her work is also held by MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, LACMA and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

Her first NFTs came in 2022 with Galerie 8+4. 2% of disorder in co-operation marked her 98th birthday: a studio visitor colors one square of a 100-square grid and she answers with a black one. The first of the fourteen sold at Sotheby's that April. In July 2023 Sotheby's sold the 500 works of Themes and Variations, made with the artist and coder Martin Grasser. Working with him, she ran her hand-drawn N, F and T letterforms through an algorithm that sets their position, size, weight and color.

The 2022 Venice Biennale gave her early computer works a gallery of their own. Molnár died in Paris on 7 December 2023, at 99. In February 2024 the Centre Pompidou opened a retrospective of her work, Parler à l'œil.