Kinetic straw marquetry panel, contemporary work

Marianne Leal, signed.

Kinetic straw marquetry panel, tribute to Victor Vasarely, red and straw.

French contemporary work.

Dimensions : H 50 x L 50 cm

Reference : LS5228451C

Victor Vasarely (1906-1997) was a Hungarian plastician, French naturalized, known as the founder of the Optic Art. In 1929, he entered to the Mühely of Budapest, known as the equivalent of the Bauhaus in Hungary, where he was initiated to constructivism and abstract art. He moved to Paris in 1930 and worked for the ad agency Havas and for the printer Draeger as a drawer and a creator. In the 1920’s-1930’s, he developed his plastic researches on line, material effects, shadows, lights and perspective.
The 1950’s marked a turning point in his art because he alternated between colors flattens and geometrical shapes to turn to kinetic art. His « Black and White » period from 1954 to 1960, made him work on graphic studies with researches on lines grids and deformations. In 1955, he exhibited to the Denise René gallery in Paris, where the accent was put on the kinetic art where movement and space were created thanks to the spectator look.
From 1960, colors were integrated in his artwork to create a universal language and a collective art. By combining shapes and colors in different ways thanks to codes and programs, propositions were multiplied where reliefs were in a perpetual transformation. In 1965, he participated to the exhibition « Responsive Eye » at the Modern Art Museum of New York, dedicated to Optic Art. At the end of the 1960’s, his linear work reappeared with the repetition of lines in downward proportions – which remind the stabile of Christel Sadde, which takes up this concept in sculpture.
He created his foundation in 1976 by establishing a contemporary art centre and a research laboratory where artists, architects, ingenious met each other to create a true collective creator work.

Straw marquetry is an art very similar to wood marquetry, in which straw replaces wood veneer. It is a technique from the Far East which was imported to Europe (England, France) in the 17th century. Having become a tradition in the 17th and 18th centuries, it fell into oblivion for a few decades before being brought back into the spotlight in the 1920s by the decorators Jean-Michel Frank and André Groult. After the war, it was Jean Royère who used this particular technique a lot. On the technical side, the straw marquetry does not require any machine: everything is done by hand. It requires very simple tools: a bone folder to crush and shine the straw, a scalpel to cut it, brush and glue. It is a craft that requires meticulousness and patience. For the most elaborate patterns, we progress at a rate of 2 cm2 per day! It is estimated that today there are about twenty craftsmen working in straw marquetry in France.