Otto Piene | |
|---|---|
 Piene in 2007 | |
| Born | (1928-04-18)18 April 1928 |
| Died | 17 July 2014(2014-07-17) (aged 86) Berlin, Germany |
| Known for | Kinetic art,Performance art |
| Movement | Zero (art) |
| Awards | Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts (2003) |
Otto Piene (PEE-nah, 18 April 1928 – 17 July 2014) was a German-American artist specializing inkinetic and technology-based art, often working collaboratively. He lived and worked inDüsseldorf, Germany;Cambridge, Massachusetts; andGroton, Massachusetts.
Otto Piene was born in 1928 inBad Laasphe and was raised inLübbecke. At the age of 16, he was drafted intoWorld War II as ananti-aircraft gunner. As a German soldier, he became fascinated by the glowing lines ofsearchlights and artillery fire in the night.[1][2]
Post-war from 1949 to 1953, he studied painting and art education at theAcademy of Fine Arts, Munich, and at theKunstakademie Düsseldorf. He was a lecturer at the Fashion Institute in Düsseldorf. From 1952 to 1957, he studiedphilosophy at theUniversity of Cologne.[3]
He was avisiting professor at theUniversity of Pennsylvania beginning in 1964. From 1968 to 1971, he was the first Fellow appointed to theCenter for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), founded byGyörgy Kepes at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. The CAVS allowed artists to work using sophisticated techniques and scientific partnership, promoting a highly-collaborative environment.[4] In 1972, Piene was appointed a Professor of Environmental Art at MIT. In 1974 he succeeded Kepes as director of the CAVS, a position he served until 1 September 1993.[5] Piene remained closely associated with CAVS and MIT for the rest of his life, and maintained longtime homes in bothGroton, Massachusetts andDüsseldorf, Germany.[6]
Piene collaborated with many artists, scientists, and engineers, including"Doc" Edgerton (pioneer ofstroboscopy) andastrophysicistWalter Lewin at MIT.[7] Many of his public installations required multiple collaborations because of their large physical scale and ambitious program. For example, his 1977Centerbeam installation involved 22 artists and a group of scientists and engineers, some of whom were based internationally.[8]
On 17 July 2014, Piene died of aheart attack in a taxi on the way to ready for the opening of his Sky Art event atNeue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Germany.[8][9] His survivors included his wife Elizabeth Goldring (a poet and artist who collaborated with him), as well as four children (including daughter artistChloe Piene), a stepdaughter, and five grandchildren.[8]
In 1957, Piene andHeinz Mack founded thegroup ZERO, consisting of artists who wanted to redefine art after World War II.[10] In 1961,Günther Uecker joined the group. By the 1960s they were internationally known, especially in Japan, Americas, and throughout Europe.[8] Members of the group includedPiero Manzoni,Yves Klein,Jean Tinguely, andLucio Fontana.[5] Piene and Mack also publishedZERO Magazine from 1957 to 1967.[11] In 2008, Piene, Mack, Uecker, andMattijs Visser created the internationalZERO foundation. The foundation maintains the ZERO archives from the three Düsseldorfer-based artists, as well as documents and photos from other related artists.
In 1957, Piene developed theGrid Picture, a type of stencilled painting made from half-tone screens with regularly arranged points in single colors (yellow, silver, white, or gold), for examplePure Energy (1958, New York, MOMA). Piene's work then developed in a variety of forms. TheLichtballette ("light ballet", 1959) was a development of the Grid Pictures; light from moving lamps was projected through grids, thus extending and stimulating the viewer's perception of space. This series of works was inspired byLászló Moholy-Nagy'sLight Space Modulator (1930, located at Harvard since 1956[12]) andFernand Léger'sBallet Mécanique (1924).[13]
Also in 1959, the combination of these grids with sources of fire (candles, gas-burners) produced smoke-traces and fire paintings, in which the paint was scorched. Piene created theseRauchbilder ("smoke pictures") as a reference to elemental natural energies and theFumage of the surrealist painterWolfgang Paalen, whom he dedicated a work after Paalen´s death in 1959. In his "fire paintings", he lightly burned a layer ofsolvent on pigmented paper, developing organic forms from the remnants of the resultingsoot deposits. Throughout the remainder of his career, he continued his practice of making "smoke pictures". Fire and smoke (their traces) are important elements in these pictures.Silver Fire (1973,Honolulu Museum of Art) is an example of a smoke picture.
Piene also experimented withmultimedia combinations. In 1963, together with Günther Uecker and Heinz Mack, he became a spokesman ofNeuen Idealismus ("the new idealism"). In 1967 Otto Piene premieredProliferation of the Sun at Aldo Tambellini's Black Gate Theater, and in 1968 he collaborated with Aldo Tambellini on theBlack Air at the Black Gate Theater. Piene is also noted for having explored new uses for broadcast television. In 1968,Aldo Tambellini and Otto Piene reformattedBlack Air asBlack Gate Cologne, which is cited as one of the first television programs to have been produced by experimental visual artists.[14]
1967 marked the beginning of Piene's involvement with "Sky Art", a term he coined in 1969 for his use of landscape and cities themselves as the focal point of his work (Source Needed). For the closing of the1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Piene created the sky workOlympic Rainbow, made up of five different-colored floatinghelium-filledpolyethylene tubes, each 600 metres (2,000 ft) long. Between 1981 and 1986, Piene organized four Sky Art conferences in the US and Europe.[15]
He experimented in industrial design in the 1970s with a 500-piece run of the upscaleSuomi tableware byTimo Sarpaneva that Piene decorated for the German Rosenthalporcelain maker'sStudio Linie.[16]
Working as the director of the CAVS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Piene collaborated in the design of the kinetic sculpture performanceCenterbeam first exhibited inKassel, Germany in 1977.[6] Later mounted on theNational Mall in Washington DC, it featured laser-projected images on moving screens of steam, solar-tracked 3-Dholograms, a 144-foot (44-metre) waterprism, and helium-buoyed sky sculptures.[8]
In 1978, Piene was commissioned by the Smithsonian Art Collectors Program to create a print to benefit the educational and cultural programs of the Smithsonian Associates. The print was to commemorate a Washington DC festival much like the 1977 exhibition in Kassel. Three lithographs resulted, all titled,Centerbeam, one of which hung in the exhibition,Graphic Eloquence, in theS. Dillon Ripley Center on the National Mall.[citation needed]
In 1999 in the Ludwig Galerie SchlossOberhausen, Piene debuted his proposal for a statue calledDas Geleucht. This monument in the form of amining lamp was to be built on thespoil tipHalde Rheinpreußen inMoers, lighting up at night. In 2007 after delays securing funding, the 30-metre (98-foot) high monument illuminated the spoil tip nightly.[17][18]
In 2011 Piene exhibited new public artworks as part of the Festival of Art, Science, and Technology (FAST) which concluded a year ofMIT150 celebrations of MIT's founding in 1861.[19]
Piene had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf, in 1959. WithLight Ballet, he debuted atHoward Wise Gallery, New York, in 1966. He represented Germany at theVenice Biennale in 1967 and 1971, and exhibited atdocumenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1959, 1964 and 1977.[20] In 1985, he exhibited at theSão Paulo Biennial.
Piene's solo exhibitions include retrospectives at the Kunstmuseum im Ehrenhof, Düsseldorf, in 1996 and at the Prague City Gallery Prague, in 2002, and a show at theMuseum am Ostwall, Dortmund in 2008-2009.[21]
Recent museum solo shows include the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2011); Museum Für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe (2013);Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (graphic work) (2013);Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2014);Langen Foundation, Neuss (2014); and LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster (2015).[3]
In 2014, theGuggenheim Museum in New York held an exhibition featuring a survey of the work of the Zero Group, that included many works by Piene.[22]
In 2019 the largest solo show to date,Fire and Light: Otto Piene in Groton, 1983–2014, debuted at theFitchburg Art Museum near the artist's former home inGroton, Massachusetts.[1][2]
Piene's works are in more than 200 museum and public collections around the world,[6] among them theMuseum of Modern Art in New York, theWalker Art Center in Minneapolis, theNational Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, theStedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, theCentre Georges Pompidou in Paris, theHarvard Art Museums, and theList Visual Arts Center at MIT.[8][5]
TheUniversity of Maryland, Baltimore County awarded Piene an honoraryDoctor of Fine Arts in 1994. In 1996, he received the Sculpture Prize of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.[8] In 2003, he became the recipient of theLeonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts in recognition of his artistic and innovative accomplishments.[23] After his death, he was praised by Germany’s minister of culture, Monika Grütters, who said that "many of his highly aesthetic works in public space were also a signal against the inhospitality of our cities".[8]
Sotheby's established a first record for works by Otto Piene when it soldRauchbild, a 1961 oil and charcoal on canvas from the Lenz-Schoenberg collection, for £223,250 ($329,000) in February 2010.[24] Only a few months later, Piene'sKleine Sonne (1963–64) was sold for £85,250 ($126,937)[25] by the Lauffs Collection atChristie's London.
