ART CITIES:N.York-Otto Piene

Otto Piene was a key artist of the 20th Century avant-garde. In 1958, at their studio in Düsseldorf, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene founded the international ZERO Movement, joined later by Günther Uecker. He played a definitive role in art’s programmatic new beginning by including elementary natural forces. His smoke and fire images, his light spaces and ballets stand for a virtually romantic longing for unity with nature.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sperone Westwater Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Sundew and Selected Works 1957-2014” at the Sperone Westwater presents paintings,sculptures and installations of the artist, embodying several important themes in the artist’s work across six decades. In the late ‘60s, Otto Piene began creating projects in the air over public spaces, events he called Sky Art. These were collaborations with scientists, engineers and often large groups of volunteers in which he created inflatable tubes or other balloonlike shapes made of polythene or other plastic substances, filled them with helium and allowed them to float above buildings or landscapes, which became backdrops for artistic events unfolding in the sky. Perhaps his best-known sky art was “Olympic Rainbow”, consisting of five different-colored polythene tubes, each 450 μmeter long, which were inflated and released to close the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. In the exhibition is on presentation “Red Sundew 2” an early inflatable sculpture, for the first time since its initial exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. These large-scale, outdoor inflatable sculptures took the sky itself as a backdrop and introduced a performative element into the artist’s work. The earliest Sky Art events later evolved into massive technological feats contextualized by their surroundings. A selection of major red paintings in the main gallery, including “Kilauea”, spans the artist’s career. These works underscore both Piene’s fascination with the color as it relates to fire and the ZERO group’s preference for the monochrome as a testing ground for light and its manifold effects. In 1963 Piene wrote, “My greatest dream is the projection of light into the vast night sky, the probing of the universe as it meets the light, untouched, without obstacles, the world of space is the only one to offer man practically unlimited freedom. (Why is there no art in space, why do we have no exhibitions in the sky? Are a few pilots perhaps artists weaving their perfect patterns in the sky? In the sky there are such enormous possibilities, and we amble along the rows of a museum while our old-fashioned pictures carry out an imaginary march-past!)”. With their performative sense of gesture, these paintings should be seen in relation to the ongoing Sky Art projects. Light was Piene’s primary source of inspiration, and his series of “Rasterbilder” gave this theme significant form. The series began in 1957 with Piene’s development of the technique in which he pressed oil paint through cardboard and metal screens onto paper and canvas. Using screens he made in 1957, Piene returned repeatedly to the “Rasterbilder” over a period of nearly 60 years, expanding the technique into new areas of his research. The radical “Lichtballette” in which Piene first projected light from electric hand lamps through his raster screens, produce an otherworldly spectral dance engaging science, nature, and technology. Among the earliest “Lichtballet” objects is a painted and punctured cardboard disc from 1960, once mounted on a manual turning apparatus. An eight-part Lichtballet installation is dominated by the “Mönchengladbach Light Wall”, reflecting Piene’s ongoing exploration of this concept. “Die Sonne reist”, 1966, a rare depiction of a red sun moving through the sky, suggests a dynamic cycle of light, fire, and energy. Along with other early works made with fire, this ZERO-period canvas contextualizes a suite of “fire gouaches” made a few months before Piene’s death. Utilizing metallic and black papers for the first time, these works are marked by an unusual luminosity, both heightened and diffuse. With their robust dimensionality, the 2014 “fire gouaches” are a bold final experiment from a restless innovator. “My dreams are different from songs and sagas. I am working toward their being festive and visible from far off. I am not pining away from longing and resignation because no patron will give me smoke and light. I already have my 12 searchlights, they belong to me. But they are just the beginning, for I would like 12 times 12, and then more, and they must be strong enough to light up the moon”. Otto Piene, Paths to paradise, in ZERO 3, Düsseldorf 1958.

Info: Sperone Westwater Gallery, 257 Bowery New York, Duration: 28/1-12/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.speronewestwater.com