German painter, printmaker and environmental artist. He studied art at the Hochschule für Bildenden Künste in Munich and the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and then philosophy at Cologne University, graduating in 1957. In the same year he developed the Grid Picture, a type of stencilled painting made from half-tone screens with regularly arranged points in single colours (yellow, silver, white or gold), for example Pure Energy (1958; New York, MOMA). The vibrating pattern and slight shadow in these works, which were first shown in September 1957 at the first evening exhibition in Piene’s studio in Düsseldorf as avant-garde manifestations of the West German art scene, seemed to take the play of light itself as their theme. Their objectivity lay in their lack of any subjective painterly gestures. The connection between art, nature and technology remained the goal of Piene’s work, first of all within the Zero group and then, from 1974, as the successor to György Kepes as director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA.
Piene’s work developed in a variety of forms. The Light Ballets (from 1959) were a development of the Grid Pictures: light from moving torches was projected through grids, thus extending and stimulating the viewer’s perception of space. At the same time the combination of these grids with sources of fire (candles, gas-burners) produced smoke-traces and fire paintings, in which the paint was burnt. From 1962 he produced the Black Sun paintings, for example Venus of Willendorf (oil and smoke on canvas, 1963; Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus.), and the Fauna and Flora paintings, which again make explicit reference to the theme of nature. This led in 1967 to Piene’s involvement with Sky art, a term he coined in 1969, which allowed him to use landscape and cities themselves as the focal point of his work. In 1972 he produced the Olympic Rainbow (see 1975 exh. cat., p. 1) for the XX Olympiad in Munich, made up of five differently coloured helium-filled polythene tubes, each one 600 m long. With Paul Earls (b 1934) and Ian Strasfogel he composed a Sky opera, Icarus. Between 1981 and 1986 Piene organized four Sky art conferences in the USA and Europe.
Stephan von Wiese
From Grove Art Online
© 2009 Oxford University Press