On display at the DAM Gallery in Berlin until 1 August is a selection of works from Vera Molnar’s collection: plotter drawings, screen prints, art prints and works on canvas, exhibited for the first time in the German capital. The exhibition is enriched by personal documents and the first edition of her notebooks, Journaux intimes 1976–2003, compiled on CD-ROM, which convey with extraordinary clarity the experimental nature of her working method and the ongoing dialogue between theoretical reflection and artistic practice.
The exhibition’s title is taken from a booklet published in 1981 by Steglitz University Hospital in Berlin as part of the Art in the Hospital project, organised by Herbert W. Franke, a key figure in the dissemination of European computer art. On that occasion, Molnar wrote: ‘I use the computer to combine forms, in the hope that this tool will allow me to distance myself from learning processes, from cultural heritage and from everything around me – in short, from the social aspects that we must regard as our second nature. Thanks to its highly sophisticated combinatorial capabilities, the computer facilitates systematic exploration of the realm of visual possibilities; it helps the painter to free themselves from cultural ‘ready-mades’ and to discover combinations of forms never before seen, either in nature or in a museum; it helps to imagine ‘unimaginable images’.’
These words are surprisingly relevant today because they describe a conception of the computer that anticipates the very functioning of contemporary generative systems. For Molnar, it was a tool for expanding the realm of the possible. Through algorithmic procedures, minimal variations and combinatorial rules, the artist transformed code into a device for exploration, bringing to light unexpected configurations that no purely intuitive process could have produced. The famous concept of the machine imaginaire, developed as early as the late 1950s, constitutes one of the first formulations of computational thinking applied to art: even before having access to computers, Molnar imagined executing sequences of instructions and systematic transformations in his mind, anticipating the algorithmic logic that today underpins generative artificial intelligence practices.
(extracted from the press release)
Vera Molnar, Unimaginable Images, DAM Gallery, Berlino, 02.05 – 01.08.2026
