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One of the most popular artistic styles of the twentieth century, Op art transformed European geometric abstraction into a global phenomenon in the mid-1960s, when its disorienting patterns and illusions, rendered with machine-like precision, became icons of the futuristic Space Age. Although it became a short-lived fad, many museums have reintroduced Op over the last fifteen years to audiences who enthusiastically embrace it as a reflection of contemporary life. Emerging at precisely the same time as mainstream video technologies and the modern digital computer, Op helped shape the aesthetics of electronic media, becoming the first artistic movement of the Information Age.

This bilingual catalogue (English and French), which accompanies an international traveling exhibition organized by the Buffalo AKG and the Musée d’arts de Nantes, features plates of 123 artworks by 88 international artists and collectives from the 1960s to the present (including Victor Vasarely, Vera Molnar, Lillian Schwartz, JODI, Ryoji Ikeda and Cory Arcangel) and offers a scholarly re-evaluation of the legacy of abstraction and the surprisingly intertwined histories of contemporary and digital art.