Otto Piene.
More Sky July 17, 2014 - August 31, 2014
New National Gallery

“I have to admit that I was always happiest in my work when it took a surprising turn.”
Otto Piene

Hardly any artist has devoted himself as much to experimentation and cross-border attempts in art as Otto Piene (1928-2014). He is one of the great artistic protagonists of the 20th century. As a co-founder of the international ZERO movement, he played a decisive role in the expansion of classical art forms such as paintings and sculptures in the 1960s. His smoke and fire paintings, his light rooms and light ballets represent an almost romantic longing for harmony with nature, incorporating real movement, light, time and space into his art production. Projects in public places in Germany and America, but especially his move to the USA at the end of the 1960s, opened up further, decisive perspectives for his experimental attitude. Since the beginning of the 1970s, Piene, together with technical engineers, has developed numerous interdisciplinary projects and events at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS, MIT, Boston) that took place in public spaces and were highly process-oriented and ephemeral. It is precisely in these ephemeral projects by the artist that an open conception of art is revealed that is still impressive today and relevant to current discourse.

With three projects in the coming summer of 2014, the Nationalgalerie Berlin and the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle would like to draw attention to this experimental attitude of Otto Piene. The focus is on artistic approaches from the 1960s and early 1970s.

New National
Gallery The large slide project “Proliferation of the Sun” is being re-staged in the New National Gallery, which Otto Piene created at the end of the ZERO period, initially for a small off-stage in New York in 1967 and in Nuremberg in the same year. Cologne and Dortmund performed again. Colorfully shimmering circular shapes are projected into the open exhibition space using hand-painted slides like planets or suns. As Piene himself describes it, they result in a “poetic space flight”. The spectral color experience will be particularly impressive in the wide hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie and, by changing the scale of the original slide projection, will also confront the austere Mies building with Otto Piene's idealism and his utopian visions.

A Sky Art event will also take place at the Neue Nationalgalerie and with the support of Deutsche Bank. The artist's quest to overcome the rigid boundaries of painting through light, smoke and fire and to realize projects together with technicians and other artists culminated in so-called “Sky Art Events” from the late 1960s onwards. From the works with floating light objects or filled balloons that had already been created in the ZERO environment, “air sculptures” emerged that Otto Piene had risen into the sky over buildings, stadiums and urban squares from 1968 onwards. For Berlin 2014, Otto Piene suggested having three large aerial sculptures rise above the roof of the Neue Nationalgalerie.

Deutsche Bank KunstHalle
In an exhibition at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, the view from these interdisciplinary and temporary projects is thrown back to the early work of Otto Piene. The focus is on major works from the ZERO years, which are not presented here as the end points of Piene's work, but rather as the starting points of a far-reaching artistic development. Early collotypes and light graphics, impressive smoke images and light sculptures, but also extensive graphic cycles refer to the experimental use of the elements air, fire, light and color, and to the dissolution of boundaries in the arts, which Otto Piene continued to push forward.