After a four-month exhibition at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (New York State, September 27, 2024 – January 27, 2025), the Musée d’arts de Nantes shows, now in France, an unprecedented presentation of the historical, theoretical and formal links between optical art and new media art from the 1960s to the present day. The exhibition is based on the complementary nature of the collections of the two museums, which are members of the FRAME network.

Optical art emerged in the 1950s, drawing on geometric abstraction to focus on the eye and movement. While placing human perception at the heart of its artistic concerns, Op Art also questioned the impact of new technologies, which asserted the movement as the art of a new era. In the 1960s, optical art aroused the interest of pioneers in video and computer art. The geometric motifs and repetitive programmed patterns – with or without machine intervention – as well as an interest in the optical and mathematical sciences, are closely related in optical and new media arts. Even today, the persistence of the Op language among certain digital artists bears witness to an artistic filiation.

This exhibition, with its resolutely contemporary resonance, questions the links between man and the machine in over 80 works. It is divided into five sections based on the fundamental elements of Op’Art: programmed repetition, binarity, 3D and the pixel. At the heart of the exhibition, a space called “Le Labo” is dedicated to the playful and educational experimentation of the optical notions developed in the various sections of the exhibition (moiré effect; retinal persistence, etc.).

The exhibition was curated in France by Salomé Van Eynde, Assistant curator and Exhibition manager. The exhibition also benefited from the scholarly research of Claire Lebossé, Curator in charge of the modern art collections in Nantes.

FRAME and the Musée d’Arts de Nantes would like to thank the Buffalo AKG Art Museum for the loan of numerous works from its collections, including the historic work Lens Picture No. 15 (1964) by Karl Gerstner, which was presented at the Buffalo Art Today: Kinetic and Optic exhibition in 1965, and which is being shown for the first time in France.

Electric Op’ is fantastic example of how the works in these two prestigious collections of optical, kinetic and abstract arts (Vasarely, Vera Molnar, Julio Le Parc, Jesús Rafael Soto) complement each other perfectly.

The exhibition catalogue for Electric Op was produced in part with the support of the FRench American Museum Exchange (FRAME). To learn more about the exhibition in Nantes, please click here, and about the exhibition in Buffalo, please click here.