Vera Molnar

Vera Molnár, born 1924 in Hungary [d. 2023, Paris, FR] was one of the pioneers of computer and algorithmic arts. Trained as a traditional artist, Molnár studied for a diploma in art history and aesthetics at the Budapest College of Fine Arts. She iterated combinatorial images from as early as 1959. In 1968 she began working with computers, where she began to create algorithmic paintings based on simple geometric shapes and geometrical themes.

Molnár created her first non-representational images in 1946. These were abstract geometrical and systematically determined paintings. In 1947 she received an artists’ fellowship to study in Rome at the Villa Giulia, and shortly after moved to France.

In the 1960s, Molnár co-founded several artist research groups: GRAV, who investigate collaborative approaches to mechanical and kinetic art, and Art et Informatique, with a focus on art and computing. Molnár learned the early programming languages of Fortran and Basic, and gained access to a computer at a research lab in Paris where she began to make computer graphic drawings on a plotter, several of which are included in a 2015 retrospective exhibition in New York City called "Regarding the Infinite | Drawings 1950-1987.”