Sperone Westwater
ADAA: The Art Show 2018

In the renowned Cologne studio of Niels Dietrich, Otto Piene created ceramic works he called “heavy paintings,” which he considered a direct extension of his work on canvas and paper. From ZERO’s inception in 1957, Piene’s exploration of light centered on his use of the raster screen, which he used to produce works on paper, paintings, light objects and installations, and finally these ceramics. He briefly explored the medium in 1999 before taking it up seriously between 2006 and his death in 2014. Made by pressing special metallic glazes through raster screens onto clay before firing, Piene’s ceramics explicitly referenced some of his earliest raster paintings in gold and silver paint. Harnessing the chance nature of the process to produce effects such as the violet tinge of oxidized gold in Goldregen [Laburnum], the ceramics also paralleled the procedure involved in Piene’s signature fire paintings and fire gouaches. Summarizing a life’s research, their technical innovation imparted new dimensionality to Piene’s longstanding formal and material concerns and underscored his desire for his work to be both intensely optical and tactile.