Vera Molnar

Molnár is part of an exhibit, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century at the Museum of Modern Art, which demonstrates the history of drawing lines. In 2005 Molnár received the DAM Digital Arts Award for her life’s work, which includes €20,000 prize, and a cataloged exhibition. Vera Molnár’s exhibit, (Un)Ordnung.(Dés)Ordre. at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv shows her early freehand drawings never exhibited before, from her late-1960s to the new installation at Museum Haus Konstruktiv.

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. Molnar 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".

Her life changed dramatically, when she was discovered singing at a cafe during the Salzburg opera season by the director Géza von Cziffra, who changed her name to Molnar and starred her as wordly, emancipated women in several of his films, notably Gabriela (1950), Die Dritte von rechts (1950) and the romantic musical comedy Der bunte Traum (1952), the most lavish production thus far undertaken in post-war Germany. At the same time, Vera and her (married) Svengali conducted a not entirely discreet affair, living together at a rented house in Hamburg. U. S. immigration authorities subsequently denied her a visa and thereby the opportunity to act in Hollywood due to her 'criminal past'.

From the mid-1950's, Vera continued to pop up in a brace of undistinguished international productions, which did little for her rapidly waning career. By the end of the decade, she called it quits.

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, where she currently resides.

A stunningly attractive, dark-haired star of post-war revue films, she was born Vera Kmet, the daughter of a German mother and a Hungarian (engineer) father. Encouraged to pursue acting after successful screen testing in Berlin, she went on to pursue drama studies in Vienna at the Reinhardt Seminar (1943-1945) at night, while conscripted to work in an armaments factory during the daytime. Following the end of the war, Vera, trying to supplement her meagre income, was caught up in black market activities and spent sixteen months in an Austrian prison.

Vera Molnár (born 1924) is a French media artist of Hungarian origin. She is considered to be a pioneer of computer art.