Otto Piene

Born. 18.04.1928 in Bad Laasphe
Died. 17.07.2014 in Berlin

German artist, founding member of the artist group Zero, pioneer of light and fire art.

About the artist

Otto Piene was born on 18 April 1928 in Bad Laasphe. In 1944, at only 16 years of age, he served as an anti-aircraft gunner in World War II and was entranced by the glows and lines from the artillery fire and high-powered searchlights.

After the war,  he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, to study painting and art education continuing his art studies at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Piene also spent five years (1952-57) studying philosophy at the University of Cologne.

In 1957, the Zero Group was founded by Piene and Heinz Mack whose goal was to redefine art. By the 1960s, the group was internationally famous in art circles in Japan, the Americas, and throughout Europe.

He moved to the US and worked as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the first Fellow to be appointed to the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), founded by György Kepes at MIT. Here artists could work using challenging techniques and scientific partnerships. In 1972, Piene was promoted to Professor of Environmental Art at MIT, and in 1974 he took over from Kepes as director, where he continued to work until 1993. Piene remained with CAVS and MIT for the rest of his life and had homes in Massachusetts, and Düsseldorf, Germany.

Piene worked with many scientists, artists, and engineers as a lot of his installations required teams to work together because of their large physical scale and ambitious design. The 1977 Centerbeam installation, which was almost 44 meters long, was a joint project by CAVS that was based on an idea by Lowry Burgess (artist) and created at MIT under Piene‘s direction.

On July 17, 2014, Piene died of a heart attack in a taxi on the way to the opening of his Sky Art event in Berlin, Germany.