Sky Artist and Magician of Flames: The ZERO Artist Otto Piene Is Dead

Otto Piene’s art knew no boundaries. He adorned the heavens with inflatable sculptures, and painted with fire. In the midst of his artistic activities, Piene has died in Berlin at the age of 86.

By Dorothea Hülsmeier for #32

Otto Piene was doing what he loved most, engaging in artistic activity. In Berlin, the elderly light and fire artist had just opened a major retrospective double exhibition. He had just inspected preparations for one of his celebrated Sky Events on the roof of the Neue Nationalgalerie. During a taxi ride, his heart gave out: the fire and sky artist Otto Piene, cofounder of the ZERO movement, died in Berlin on July 17 at the age of 86. Those who accompanied him during his final days have said that he was “very gratified and contented” with the homage in Berlin.

Despite his great age, Piene still had many plans, and continued to commute tirelessly between the US – where he lived with his wife on a farm in Groton (Massachusetts) – and Germany. Piene always remained closely linked to Düsseldorf, where the ZERO artists’ movement had its origins.

The Sky as Canvas

For Piene, the sky was a canvas, and paintbrushes were flames. He painted pictures using smoke, from which fire flowers emerged. In the late 1950s, when abstract painting was the dominant tendency within postwar art, Piene and his colleagues sought a radically new beginning. They experimented with the elemental forces of nature: light, movement, wind, fire, air, energy.

In 1957, Piene initiated the ZERO movement in Düsseldorf together with Heinz Mack. Somewhat later, they were joined by Günther Uecker. From that point onward, Piene, Mack, and Uecker formed the ZERO triumvirate. And until recently, all three continued to work in their studios. Now, Uecker and Mack will continue without him.

Today, Piene’s fire flowers hang in museums, but his art is not really well adapted to enclosed spaces. It is fleeting, designed for the moment. His paradigm, he once said, is the sky, which “also changes constantly.”

Piene was a protagonist in the development of new art forms, among them media art and performance. He did not paint light; instead, he allowed it to paint. The results were “light rooms,” “light spirits,” “light ballets,” self-moving spatial projections. He produced colorful fire gouaches and fire flowers, painting on the canvas with flammable pigments, which he then ignited.

Inflatable Sculptures

Piene referred to his sky projects as “Inflatables,” which took the form of spiky white stars or flowers. A celebrated instance is the enormous plastic rainbow he floated above the Munich Olympic Games in 1972 – which became a symbol of the hope for peace after the assassination of the Israeli team.

Born on April 28, 1928, Piene grew up in the small town of Lübbecke in eastern Westphalia. He was strongly marked by the darkness of World War II, which he experienced as a young antiaircraft assistant. “The result was this tremendous impulse to make something of it,” he once said. At a time when everything had been destroyed, he wanted to create something “as an expression of the soul, something capable of fostering spiritual understanding between people.” Piene wanted to bring light, with all of its force, back into the world again.

Until 1964, Piene worked as an instructor at the Modeschule Düsseldorf, but then emigrated to the US. In 1974, Piene assumed directorship of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For 20 years, he headed the media laboratory for artistic and visual experimentation.

Eliasson and Saraceno in the Tradition of the Light Artist

Piene’s interrelationship of art, nature, science, and technology remains cutting edge even today. With their intersections between art and physical experimentation, younger artists such as the Dane Olafur Eliasson and Tomás Saraceno – both represented currently at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen – still work in the tradition of the light artist. Today, Piene is esteemed as one of the “shining lights” of 20th and 21st century art.