Otto Piene valuation
Founded ZERO in a bombed Dusseldorf, and made pictures out of smoke, fire and light.
Otto Piene was born in Westphalia in 1928, was conscripted as a teenage anti-aircraft auxiliary in the last year of the war, and co-founded ZERO with Heinz Mack in Dusseldorf in 1957 — a deliberate restart, using light, movement and elemental materials rather than the gestural painting that had preceded it.
What a work by Otto Piene is worth
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Bio
Otto Piene was born in Westphalia in 1928, was conscripted as a teenage anti-aircraft auxiliary in the last year of the war, and co-founded ZERO with Heinz Mack in Dusseldorf in 1957 — a deliberate restart, using light, movement and elemental materials rather than the gestural painting that had preceded it. He made Rasterbilder by pressing pigment through perforated stencils, then the Rauchbilder and Feuerbilder, drawn with candle smoke and lit solvent so the picture is made by combustion. Later he ran the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and made enormous inflatable Sky Art. He died in 2014.
The smoke and fire paintings of the late 1950s and 1960s lead this market, which has strengthened considerably since the ZERO reassessment of the 2010s. They are also among the more delicate objects in post-war art: soot and scorched pigment on paper or canvas, unfixed or barely fixed, which cannot be cleaned and which abrade on contact. Light and kinetic works carry component-obsolescence questions. Works on paper are numerous, and there is a substantial print output. The ZERO foundation in Dusseldorf holds the archive.
Munich, MIT and the Olympic Rainbow
Piene studied painting and art education in Munich and Düsseldorf from 1949 to 1953, and philosophy at the University of Cologne from 1952 to 1957. The Grid Pictures began in 1957, among them Pure Energy of 1958, now in the Museum of Modern Art, and the Light Ballet followed in 1959; the first fire paintings came around 1961, the year Günther Uecker joined ZERO.
From 1968 to 1971 he was the first fellow of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, founded by György Kepes, and for the closing of the 1972 Munich Olympics he made Olympic Rainbow from five helium-filled polyethylene tubes. He died in Berlin in July 2014, on his way to the opening of a Sky Art event at the Neue Nationalgalerie.
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