Press Release Heinz Mack & Otto Piene

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PRESS RELEASE HEINZ MACK & OTTO PIENE “From Zero To Hero“ Exhibition: 09 June 2018 - 28 July 2018 Opening: 08 June 2018 / 18 - 21 pm PLUTSCHOW GALLERY is pleased to present "FROM ZERO TO HERO", an exhibition dedicated to the founders of the Zero movement in our Zürich gallery space. Heinz Mack (1931) attended the Academy of Arts Düsseldorf during the 1950s. He exhibited works at documenta in 1964 and 1977 and he represented Germany at the 1970 Venice Biennale. His contributions to op art, light art and kinetic art are worldly renowned. Otto Piene (1928-2014) is best known for his smoke and ﬁre and his raster paintings. Called Rauchbilder (smoke pictures), Piene applied solvent to pigmented paper and lit it on ﬁre, developing images in the residual soot. Together, both artists initiated in Düsseldorf the Zero movement, active from 1957-66. With the desire to move away from subjective postwar movements and reduce the prominence of the role of the artist to create art, both artists gave extensive focus purely about the materials and the world in which those materials exist - meaning light and space. The exhibition will showcase works by both artists spanning from the Zero period to more recent creations with the aim to praise their careers to the hero status. Yes, I dream of a better world. Should I dream of a worse? Yes, I desire a wider world. Should I desire a narrower? –Otto Piene, "Paths to Paradise" in ZERO 3 (July 1961) For further information, please contact: Roman Plutschow [email protected], +41 79 293 52 22 Marianna Quartieri [email protected], +41 76 736 70 47 Romeo Bucher [email protected], +41 79 826 38 89 #fromzerotohero #heinzmack #ottopiene #plutschowgallery #plutschow .

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141014 Press Release Piene En
PLUTSCHOW GALLERY In retrospect, we must call epochal when two young Düsseldorf artists invited the public into their studio and proclaimed the zero hour of post-war art on 11 April 1957. It was birth of ZERO. A series of evening exhibitions by Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and a little later Günther Uecker marked the beginning of a new avant- garde. The movement traveled elsewhere and was taken up by artists like Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely and Yayoi Kusama, each with a mission to reinvent and redefine art in the aftermath of World War II. The Plutschow & Felchlin gallery is proud to present Otto Piene, one of the great artistic figures of the 20th century. The Objects exhibition offers a great overview of his decades-long investigation of technology and light phenomena embodied into an art that was focused on life. The delicate selection of recent works are appearing in various medium such as ceramics, gouaches and steel work by showing its strong roots in the Grid Pictures (1957)–a type of stencilled painting made from half-tone screens with regularly arranged points in single colors– and the never ceased faith to the essential idea of ZERO. The exhibition serves as a premier of Otto Piene’s last completed sculpture, the LightCube (?). The masterpiece is part of the Piruette series, which were the development of the so-called Lichtballett (light ballet) kinetic art installation from 1959: light from moving torches was projected through grids, thus extending and stimulating the viewer’s perception of space. His investigation in light is a lineal descendent of the Bauhaus tradition and László Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator (1930).
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