Lot 64 | Otto Piene | Lichtgeist

ZERO
"Mack and I entered the scene when Tachism was the art of the season. As students, we had ‘swum through’ most of the styles and movements of modern art. [...] We were against almost everything around us—like Dada after World War I—but what were we for? The work itself gave us the answer. We realized that it could arise from our education, our thinking, our feelings, our imagination, without any predetermined theory. Quite simply, we worked, were asked questions, answered them—and the result was Zero. [...] My experience in designing lamps and lighting, Mack's work with mosaics, and our joint projects in ‘serial’ graphics led to the perception of overarching phenomena: light and vibration. The sensitivity of these ‘media’ demanded new purity, sobriety, control, discipline, and nuance of perception and alertness." (Otto Piene, “Position Zero” (1965/92), quoted from the exhibition catalog Zero – Eine Europäische Avantgarde, Galerie Neher, Essen/Galerie Heseler, Munich/Mittelrhein-Museum Koblenz, 1992/93, pp. 7/8.

An exciting career
Otto Piene – co-founder of the famous ZERO movement – is considered a key figure in the international post-war avant-garde and an important representative of visionary light art. After studying at the Blocherer School of Interior Design and Communication Design, he turned to the fine arts and continued his education at the academies in Munich and Düsseldorf, as well as in philosophy in Cologne.
Early on, he experimented with light, fire, and movement, creating light-kinetic works, poetic light ballets that illuminate the surrounding space, smoke and fire images, and monumental “sky events” in which he opens up the sky as an artistic space. His projection of a giant rainbow at the closing ceremony of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich became legendary.
In the US since 1964, the artist taught at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge from 1968, serving as its director from 1974 to 1994. In 2014, Piene was awarded the first German Light Art Prize.

Light as an immaterial material and expression of a new artistic beginning
Otto Piene's “Lichtgeist” (Light Spirit) from 1969 is a contribution to the development of an innovative and groundbreaking art form in which light plays a central role. The vertically towering sculpture consists of a sequence of softly modeled, bulbous forms that taper rhythmically toward the top. This gradation creates a dynamic silhouette that follows an architectural order on the one hand and is reminiscent of organic growth processes on the other.
A light source hidden inside allows a warm, subdued glow to penetrate the translucent surface of the gently curved forms. This shapes the volumes, creates flowing transitions between light and shadow, and gives the sculpture an almost breathing presence. In this way, Otto Piene succeeds in making light tangible not merely as a means of illumination, but as an integral material of his work. The artist understands light as a living force, as the transformation of energy into form—the invisible becomes visible, the immaterial becomes tangible.
Piene's “Lichtgeist” embodies the idea of light art that transcends the purely material and opens up a sensual, spatial, immaterial experience. The work is a significant contribution to the awakening and radical new beginning of the post-1945 era, in which Piene emerges as one of its most important pioneers.
Doris Hansmann