Biography
Yaacov Agam en 2017 devant son Salon, une œuvre conçue et réalisée pour les appartements privés de Georges Pompidou à l'Elysée entre 1972 et 1974. Photo © H. Véronèse / Centre Pompidou
Yaacov Agam en 2017 devant son Salon, une œuvre conçue et réalisée pour les appartements privés de Georges Pompidou à l'Elysée entre 1972 et 1974. Photo © H. Véronèse / Centre Pompidou

Agam’s oeuvre is certainly one of the outstanding phenomena of European artistic culture since the Second World War. - Giulo Carlo Argan

Yaacov Agam is an internationally renowned painter and sculptor and one of the founding fathers of kinetic art. His first solo exhibition in 1953 at the Craven Gallery is at the same time the first kinetic exhibition in the history of art. Based in Paris from that date, he met artists Brancusi, Fernand Leger, Auguste Herbin, André Breton and Max Ernst.
 
In February 2010 an exhibition was opened at the Tinguely museum in Basel, Switzerland, in tribute to the legendary one that took place in Paris in 1955: "The Movement". This exhibition, which included the Venezuelan Jesus Soto (1923-2005), the Belgian Pol Bury 1922-2005), the Swiss Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), the Hungarian Victor Vasarely (1906-1997), the Danish Robert Jacobson ( 1912-1993), but also Marcel Duchamp and Alexandre Calder, was at the origin of the foundation of the kinetic movement in Paris that year.

 

The famous "Manifesto Jaune" manifesto written by Vasarely was distributed during this exhibition. Despite the equal representation of all the artists at this show, this text, published on a yellow paper and signed by Vasarely only, made him appear as the founder and leader of the kinetic movement. History has thus retained the disproportionate role of Vasarely in setting up the foundations and aesthetic codes of kinetics.

 

In 1965, ten years after this founding exhibition, the exhibitions "Light and Movement" and "The Responsive Eye" were held respectively at the Kunsthalle Bern and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. The international fame of Agam increases considerably as a result of these exhibitions. Movement, color, music and time are at the center of his work.

 

Agam introduced into art the fourth dimension, that of time allied to movement. His painted or sculpted works, always in the making, favor the shape and the color in motion on the static and the frozen and associate the spectator with the work of the creation.

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