Otto Piene (1928)
Germany
Biography :
Otto Piene (1928-2014) was born in Laasphe, Westphalia, Germany. He lived and worked in Düsseldorf, Cambridge, and Groton, Massachusetts. Piene was one of the founding members of the group ZERO (1957-1966), alongside Heinz Mack and later Günther Uecker. From 1948 to 1953 he attended the Blocherer Art School and studied painting at the Academy of Arts in Munich and at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Piene received his degree in philosophy from the University of Cologne in 1957. After serving as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964, Piene became the first Fellow of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT from 1968 to 1971 for that he coined the term "Sky Art" to refer to large outdoor sky/light projects, such as Olympic Rainbow for the 1972 Munich Olympics. That same year, Piene became a professor of environmental art at MIT and, from From 1974 to 1994, he was director of the CAVS. Solo exhibitions include retrospectives at the Kunstmuseum im Ehrenhof, Düsseldorf (1996); the Prague City Gallery (2002) and the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund (2008-2009). The artist presented an exhibition of light ballets and fire paintings at Sperone Westwater in 2010, followed by a retrospective devoted to painting, sculpture and installation in 2016. Among the solo exhibitions recently presented in museums include the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2011), ZKM 1 Museum. Für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe (2013), Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (graphic work) (2013), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2014), Langen Foundation, Neuss (2014) and LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster (2015). In 2014, the Guggenheim Museum in New York opened an extensive historical inventory of the ZERO group's work, featuring a diverse selection of Piene's works. In 2015, a traveling exhibition of ZERO artworks was presented at the Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin and traveled to the Stedlijk Museum in Amsterdam. Another major exhibition of the ZERO group took place at the S.U. Sakip Sabanci Museum (2015-2016). Piene's work is in many important public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.