An internationally acclaimed artist is headed to Malta with his linear sculptures that depict the struggle between the artist and steel.

With the upcoming title of Capital of Culture looming on the horizon, the island will next year welcome Bernar Venet, a 71-year-old artist who has made a big name for himself on the international art scene.

His solo show in Versailles in 2011 attracted more than six million visitors. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across Europe, America, Asia and New Zealand.

Mr Venet has put up more than 250 solo exhibitions and joined 575 group exhibitions. A total of 200 publications have been dedicated solely to his work.

He put up his first exhibition when he was just 14 but his breakthrough came when he moved to Nice and started painting canvases with tar.

Today, his sculptures sell for as much as €800,000.

But Mr Venet is probably best known for his thick steel beam sculptures that have no welded or attached pieces, and which he hopes he will bring to Malta next March.

His exhibition will be put on across Valletta, although the precise venues have not yet been decided. However, the sculptures will probably be seen at St George’s Square, on the Granaries in Floriana, in front of the Triton Fountain, and outside St Elmo.

When the Frenchman left Nice for New York in his early 20s, his experimental nature quickly propelled him to the forefront of what is now known as Conceptual Art.

Along the years he developed a series of work steeped in “non-art propositions” that he borrowed from theoretical scientists.

The line, in all its mathematical variations and physical shapes, started to dominate his work in the 1970s but he later departed from the mathematical model and developed the more personal “indeterminate line”.

In his sculptures, Mr Venet approaches the “indeterminate line” by tackling the technical and physical extent to which a curve on steel beams departs from its planar state.