Otto Piene (1928 Laasphe - 2014 Berlin) Fire gouache... Lot 2113

Otto Piene (1928 Laasphe - 2014 Berlin) Fire gouache "Reflection". Original title Composition in red, blue, violet tones with flower-like, reflecting, gray-black fire trace or smoke drawing and individual color splashes. In motif and style representative fire gouache Piene created in 1975-1977. In 1958, together with Heinz Mack, he founded the important avant-garde artist group "Zero," which Günther Uecker joined in 1961. The basic idea prevailing at the founding of "Zero" was a complete and radical new beginning in painting and sculpture, starting literally from the level of "zero", the inclusion of light (and shadow) and for Piene also of fire in artistic creation. Mack and Piene disseminated their views and ideas about art in 1958-1961 in the eponymous magazine "ZERO". In 1959, Piene first began to work with candles, flames as well as smoke in so-called "smoke drawings" and further developed this technique by lighting paint from spray cans. Light, fire and the sun as the largest fire known to us became main motifs of his oeuvre. In addition to two-dimensional smoke and fire paintings, Piene was also intensively involved with multimedia performances, "light ballet" works, other light kinetic works, aerial and light sculptures. In 1967 and 1971, Piene was responsible for the design of the German Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia. In 1972, Piene became Professor of Visual Design for Environmental Art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which appointed him Director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) there in 1974, a position he held until 1994. In December 2008, Piene co-founded the ZERO foundation together with Heinz Mack, Günther Uecker and the Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast. One of Piene's first and most important exhibitions included participation in documenta II in 1959 and documenta 3 in Kassel in 1964, where the "Zero" group occupied its own space; exhibitions followed in New York (1964) and Hanover (1965), among others, and participation in documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977. In 1997, a retrospective was dedicated to Piene at the Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf; in 2014, a parallel exhibition "Otto Piene: More Sky" took place at the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Deutsche Bank-Kunsthalle in Berlin. Mixed media/paper. R. u. sign. u. dat. (19)75/77. L. u. titled. Approx. 67.6 cm x 95.7 cm. Frame. Mixed media with gouache and fire on paper. Signed, dated (19)75/77 and titled.