Otto Piene (pronounced PEE-nah, 18 April 1928 – 17 July 2014) was a German-American artist specializing in kinetic and technology-based art, often working collaboratively. He lived and worked in Düsseldorf, Germany; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Groton, Massachusetts.
Biography
Otto Piene was born in 1928 in Bad Laasphe and was raised in Lübbecke. At the age of 16, he was drafted into World War II as an anti-aircraft gunner. As a German soldier, he became fascinated by the glowing lines of searchlights and artillery fire in the night.
Post-war from 1949 to 1953, he studied painting and art education at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He was a lecturer at the Fashion Institute in Düsseldorf. From 1952 to 1957, he studied philosophy at the University of Cologne.
He was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania beginning in 1964. From 1968 to 1971, he was the first Fellow appointed to the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), founded by György Kepes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The CAVS allowed artists to work using sophisticated techniques and scientific partnership, promoting a highly-collaborative environment. 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 September 1, 1993. Piene remained closely associated with CAVS and MIT for the rest of his life, and maintained longtime homes in both Groton, Massachusetts and Düsseldorf, Germany.
Piene collaborated with many artists, scientists, and engineers, including "Doc" Edgerton (pioneer of stroboscopy) and astrophysicist Walter Lewin at MIT. Many of his public installations required multiple collaborations because of their large physical scale and ambitious program. For example, his 1977 Centerbeam installation involved 22 artists and a group of scientists and engineers, some of whom were based internationally.
On July 17, 2014, Piene died of a heart attack in a taxi on the way to ready for the opening of his Sky Art event at Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Germany. His survivors included his wife Elizabeth Goldring (a poet and artist who collaborated with him), as well as four children (including daughter artist Chloe Piene), a stepdaughter, and five grandchildren.
Group Zero
In 1957, Piene and Heinz Mack founded the group ZERO, consisting of artists who wanted to redefine art after World War II. In 1961, Günther Uecker joined the group. By the 1960s they were internationally known, especially in Japan, Americas, and throughout Europe. Members of the group included Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and Lucio Fontana. Piene and Mack also published ZERO Magazine from 1957 to 1967. In 2008, Piene, Mack, Uecker, and Mattijs Visser created the international ZERO foundation. The foundation maintains the ZERO archives from the three Düsseldorfer-based artists, as well as documents and photos from other related artists.
Works
In 1957, Piene developed the Grid Picture, a type of stencilled painting made from half-tone screens with regularly arranged points in single colors (yellow, silver, white, or gold), for example Pure Energy (1958, New York, MOMA). Piene's work then developed in a variety of forms. The Lichtballette ("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 by László Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator (1930, located at Harvard since 1956) and Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924).
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 these Rauchbilder ("smoke pictures") as a reference to elemental natural energies and the Fumage of the surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen, whom he dedicated a work after Paalen´s death in 1959. In his "fire paintings", he lightly burned a layer of solvent on pigmented paper, developing organic forms from the remnants of the resulting soot 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.