Victor Vasarely (1908-1997)

Victor Vasarely was a Hungarian-French graphic artist and painter. As a trained advertising graphic artist, Vasarely came to Paris in 1930, where he began to experiment with graphic representations of abstracted animal and human figures, which were composed as refractive forms in black and white checkerboard patterns, e.g. Harlequin (1933, Vasarely Museum, Gordes). The peculiar optical effect in these works made him an early pioneer of the art movement op-art. From 1947, Vasarely removed all figurative elements from his formal language, which was now transformed into very concrete pictorial geometry, whose flickering patterns evoked surprising spatial and movement effects in the surface, e.g. Vonal SSZ (1968, Musée d'art moderne, Paris). In 1970, he opened his own museum in Gordes, and in 1976 he founded the Fondation Vasarely in Aix-en-Provence.

Source: The Great Dane