This paper is concerned with the study of a penalization-gradient algorithmfor solving variational inequalities, namely, find x ∈ C such that Ax, y − x ≥ 0 for all y ∈ C, where A : H → H is a single-valued operator, C is a closed convex set of a real Hilbert space H. Given Ψ : H → ∪ { ∞} which acts as a penalization function with respect to the constraint x ∈ C, and a penalization parameter βk, we consider an algorithm which alternates a proximal step with respect to ∂Ψ and a gradient step with respect to A and reads as xk I λkβk∂Ψ −1 xk−1 − λkAxk−1 . Under mild hypotheses, we obtain weak convergence for an inverse strongly monotone operator and strong convergence for a Lipschitz continuous and strongly monotone operator. Applications to hierarchical minimization and fixed-point problems are also given and the multivalued case is reached by replacing themultivalued operator by its Yosida approximatewhich is always Lipschitz continuous.