The Three Pioneers of Algorithmic Art at Pera Museum “Calculations and Coincidences”

Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Pera Museum is set to welcome the autumn season with a remarkable exhibition featuring the works of three pioneering figures in algorithmic and computer art: Dóra Maurer, Vera Molnár, and Gizella Rákóczy. The exhibition titled Calculations and Coincidences: Algorithmic Art from the Central Bank of Hungary Collection, is organized as part of the 2024 Hungarian - Turkish Cultural Year and focuses on how Maurer, Molnár, and Rákóczy have expanded the boundaries of abstraction through the integration of computers, algorithms, and mathematics, highlighting the artistic tools of the digital age and the artists' quest for innovation.

Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Pera Museum has brought art enthusiasts together with the exhibition titled Calculations and Coincidences: Algorithmic Art from the Central Bank of Hungary Collection organized as part of the 2024 Hungarian - Turkish Cultural Year. The exhibition, featuring the works of Vera Molnár, a pioneer of algorithmic and computer art, alongside Dóra Maurer and Gizella Rákóczy, is curated by Kinga Rózsa Hamvai.

At the intersection of arts, science, and mathematics: Calculations and Coincidences

Calculations and Coincidences offers art enthusiasts a journey into the fascinating world of abstraction and algorithmic art by focusing on the works of three esteemed artists who bring together arts and mathematics, order and disorder. The works of Maurer, Molnár and Rákóczy showcase the artists' innovative approaches while tracing the legacy of Hungary's rich tradition, which has embraced remarkable explorations and innovations in this field since the first half of the 20^th century.

Curator Kinga Rózsa Hamvai, states that the exhibition aims to introduce three significant oeuvres shaped by mathematical patterns and serial orders while seeking to discover the similarities between them. She emphasizes that the consistent application of rules and principles of order, analytical thinking in structures and sequences, and the search for freedom have deemed the three artists presented in the exhibition “timeless”, adding; “How does artistic subject, the possibility of free choice, surprise or chance, appear in these demanding systems of mathematical rigour? What answers can be given to the “accusation” of the dehumanisation of art? Each artist here offers different timeless responses while employing different strategies, such as choosing from the countless variations generated by an algorithm, deviating from the pattern, painting freehand, using colours as elements of a mathematical system or even randomly choosing colours.”

A closer look at the artists and their works

Vera Molnár: A Pioneer of Algorithmic Art

Vera Molnár, one of the most significant figures in algorithmic art, began working with computers in the early 1960s, when they were still in their infancy. Vera Molnár, whose works have been exhibited at world-renowned art institutions and events such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Centre Pompidou, and the Venice Biennale, situated her work, as often quoted, as navigating between the “three con’s”: conceptualists, constructivists, and computer.

Since 1946, her work has been non-figurative and geometric, and in 1959, she began creating combinatorial images and modelling mathematical laws using what she called the “machine imaginaire”. Molnár borrowed the phrase from the contemporary composer Michel Philippot. The two oil paintings on display in Calculations and Coincidences, “Squaring the Circle” (1962-1964) and “Ikons” (1962–1966), are dated from this period. The “imaginary machine” method involved drawing sequences step by step, freehand, using simple algorithms. An illustrative example of which is the transformation of a simple line in the series “Slow Rotating Movement” (1957-2013), presenting artistic freedom and mathematical constraints together through the gradual transformation of a line.

In 1968, Molnár was given the opportunity to work with a “machine réelle”, meaning a real computer, and began to produce her works with the help of computers. In her works using the Molnárt System, a revolutionary approach to revealing algorithmic processes in art which she developed with her husband François Molnár, she tried to find artistic ‘beauty’ through the “1% disorder” (the placement of a different colour, direction or line thickness into an ordered basic structure).

Another example of the artist’s characteristic working method, the “interrogation” of forms, can be seen in “Hypertransformation” (1976) or “Square Structures” (1987). The starting point of which is one or more regular squares, but minimal variation in the parameters, sometimes with curved displacements of the sides of the square, results in a “complex disorder”.

“Electra” (1983), a series of colour prints inspired by Claude Monet's “Impression of the Rising Sun” (1872), stands out as an exploration of the relationship between electronics and art.

In 2007, Vera Molnár was awarded the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture, and among her recent works are collaborations in the NFT space with Martin Grasser, a familiar name in generative art. Molnár, who passed away in December 2024, just a month before her 100^th birthday, continued her innovative approach using the artistic tools of the digital age until the end of her life.

Dóra Maurer: Movement and Mathematical Structures

In her over fifty-year artistic career, Dóra Maurer, whose works have been exhibited in leading art institutions such as the Tate Modern and the Ludwig Museum, has created works in various fields such as graphics, photography, film, and painting, focusing on themes of movement, variability, and mathematical sequences. Measurement, proportions, and mathematics are prominent themes within her practice. The artist describes her creative process as follows: “I’m interested – to use an ugly technical term – in thematising the structure. This means that, on the basis of an observation or even experience, I set up a model situation in which several elements – they can be geometric shapes or human characteristics that are verbally difficult to describe – are present and I let them interact with each other using an appropriate guideline of orders. Whatever is created, I continue to observe it, and if possible, I continue to shape it.”

The artist's film “Learned Involuntary Movements” (1973) explores the themes of sequence and variation by repeating a series of a woman's involuntary movements. This work brings together Maurer’s systematic approach to the randomness of art. The film titled “Timing” (1973–1980), in which the artist took the concept of structure further, is also presented in the exhibition for art enthusiasts.

From the 1980s onward, Maurer’s practice shifted towards painting. In her “As You Like” series, where she painted geometric grids of different colours, she explored the changing perception of colours created by the reflection of plane and space on one another. “As You Like 12” (1990) and “As You Like 54” (2009), prominently feature mathematical colour arrangements and geometric forms and are displayed in the exhibition.

In the “Overlappings” series, which began in the late 1990s and is also presented in the exhibition, the artist curved the grid fields familiar to her earlier works and filled them with colour, making the pseudo-transparent fields of colour shifting on top of each other the central motif of the paintings.

Gizella Rákóczy: Geometric Art and Spirals

One of the leading figures in geometric art, Gizella Rákóczy, began exploring the movements and serial possibilities of four-armed spirals in 1976. The work titled “Four Armed Spirals’ Direction of Rotation” (1978–1979), displayed in the exhibition, demonstrates how the artist investigates these structures with a "combinatorial" approach, working within a system of four-armed spirals.

Following 1998, tempera paintings based on the number laws of four-armed spirals were replaced by watercolour, wherein the artist layered the tonal shades of translucent paint based on the formula of the Fibonacci series. The work titled “4 Tones of 4 Colours” (1998), featured in the exhibition, reveals how Rákóczy achieves aesthetic results through the systematic arrangement of colours. Another work created using the Fibonacci sequence, “24N” (2002), demonstrates that the number of colour variations and resulting tones on the 24 panels is almost infinite.

From 2000 onwards, Rákóczy was fascinated by the labyrinth of Cretan lines, and her works from this period explore the relationship between the labyrinth, which has been an essential symbol since antiquity, geometric forms and mathematical structures. The work titled “4-Colour Labyrinth” (2005), featured in the exhibition, is a significant piece that demonstrates how the artist transformed this symbolic structure into a subject of artistic exploration.

Calculations and Coincidences: Algorithmic Art from the Central Bank of Hungary Collection, designed by Yelta Köm (Studio No Frame), with graphic and catalog design by Esen Karol, will be on display until January 26, 2025, on the 4^th and 5^th floor exhibition galleries of Pera Museum.

Pera Museum is open from 10:00 to 19:00 Tuesday through Saturday, and from 12:00 to 18:00 on Sundays. Admission to Pera Museum is free of charge every Friday from 18.00 to 22.00 during “Long Friday” and for students every Wednesday as part of “Young Wednesday”.