Vasarely, Victor

orig. Viktor Vásárhelyi

(born April 9, 1908, Pécs, Hung.—died March 15, 1997, Paris, France) Hungarian French painter. Trained in Budapest in the Bauhaus tradition, he moved to Paris in 1930 and supported himself as a commercial artist. In the 1930s he was influenced by Constructivism, but by the 1940s he was painting animated surfaces of geometric forms and interacting colours. His style reached maturity in the mid 1950s and 1960s, with the use of more vibrant colours to increase the sense of movement through optical illusion, as in Sirius II (1954), and he became one of the leading figures of the Op art movement.

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