Breda – 26 October 2025 – 30 January 2026
Following her acclaimed 2023 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris—which marked the artist’s centenary and reaffirmed her place as a founding figure of digital and generative art—this exhibition offers an intimate continuation of that legacy in the Netherlands.
Spanning seven decades of radical experimentation, A Legacy! traces Molnar’s evolution from early hand-made studies to her first computer-generated drawings and later serial portfolios. The exhibition includes rare early works that established her structural grammar—such as De la série T (1953/58), Sans titre (1958/59), and Trame de Couleur, bleu (1965)—alongside her first computer-based plotter series Interruptions (1969) and subsequent machine drawings from the early 1970s, including Mondrian, 8 Segments, and Segments et leurs croisements (1971).
These pioneering plotter works—realized with one of the first computers in Europe—mark Molnar’s decisive shift from hand-drawn conceptual systems to algorithmic compositions. Together with later drawings such as Lent Mouvement Giratoire (1975) and Hypertransformation (1975), they reveal her lifelong dialogue between logic and emotion, between structure and chance.
Molnar once remarked: “If you replace the word random with intuition, there you have it.” That subtle interplay—between strict procedure and human feeling—defined her entire practice. Whether through the rhythmic grids of De la série 9 Carrés (1980s) or the reflective series Albers Autrement (1998–2013), she continually reimagined what abstraction could be in the age of computation.
Today, in a world shaped by algorithms, data, and screens, Molnar’s work feels more relevant than ever. Long before digital technology became ubiquitous, she saw the computer not as a tool but as a thinking partner—“a dialogue,” as she called it. Her art reminds us that systems can be poetic, and that geometry can hold emotion.
When curator Hans Ulrich Obrist once asked her whether emotion or geometry came first, Molnar smiled and replied: “For me, emotion was geometry.” It is a perfect summary of why her work remains so radical: she proved that reason can feel.
“Molnar made rules her material,” says Martijn Dijkstra of Interface Gallery. “This exhibition follows that lifelong method—from fragile studies to decisive plotter lines—revealing an artist who paired rigor with curiosity.”