Vera Molnar

Vera Molnar, was born in 1924 in Budapest but has lived and worked in Paris for many years. She started painting at the age of twelve, her first subject matter, nymphs and trees, inspired by an uncle. She soon progressed to more geometrical themes, and in 1968 started working with computers. Her work during this period focused on the breakup of repeating units, often expressed as a series of increasingly fractured images.

In 1947, she graduated as a Professor of Art History and Aesthetics from the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. Although Molnar may be best known for being a pioneer of computer art, her systematic method to creating art began in 1959, almost 10 years before she began using a computer, through what she called the “Machine Imaginaire”. Molnar imagined she had a computer, creating a series of steps by which an image would be created. By repeatedly following this procedure with slight modifications, Molnar created series of images to research the subtleties that turn a collection of forms into the “epiphany” of art. Creating this art by hand was very limiting for Molnar. Because the time and tedium involved, she was unable to freely explore every visual possibility of a set of rules. This ended in 1968 when she began creating art with the use of a computer, an IBM 370 with an IBM 2250 CRT monitor, and plotter.

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