Otto Piene

Otto Piene, co-founder of the Düsseldorf-based Group Zero, made highly experimental, process-based artworks that embraced unconventional materials including smoke, fire, and light. To make his series “Rauchbilder” (German for “smoke pictures”), he applied solvent to pigmented paper and lit it on fire, developing images in the residual soot. Piene also built large-scale public projects that he called “Sky Art”; some incorporated helium-filled sculptures. In his “Light Ballets,” he projected light through perforated globes, columns, and other materials. For nearly 20 years, Piene served as the director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2008, he co-founded the International ZERO Foundation with Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker to archive documents, projects, and images produced by Group Zero. Piene’s work has sold for six figures at auction and belongs in the collections of the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.