Picture "9 April III" (2001) (Unique piece)
Picture "9 April III" (2001) (Unique piece)
Quick info
unique piece | signed | dated | titled | fire gouache on cardboard | framed | size 81 x 108 cm
Detailed description
Picture "9 April III" (2001) (Unique piece)
Fire gouache on cardboard, 2001, signed, dated and titled. Motif size/sheet size 72.7 x 100.7 cm. Size in frame 81 x 108 cm as shown.
Producer: ARTES Kunsthandelsgesellschaft mbH, Bödekerstraße 13, 30161 Hannover, Deutschland E-Mail: info@kunsthaus-artes.de
About Otto Piene
(1928-2014)
Otto Piene was a great pioneer in the field of international light art. Born on March 18, 1928, in Laasphe, Germany, he studied at the art academies in Munich and Düsseldorf. In 1957, he co-founded the influential artist group ZERO with Heinz Mack, which later welcomed Günther Uecker as a member.
Piene began to experiment with immaterial pictorial means such as light and shadow, air, and fire. According to Otto Piene, his fire paintings are "survival studies, formed from private purgatory. The elementary opposites of solid matter. The fire gouaches on paper result with the transitions, nuances and prismatic realities and unrealities of painting."
The act of painting with fire is as intense and destructive as the resulting work. The artist sprays the painting surface with thick layers of car paint and ignites it so that the paint blisters and traces of soot form on the paper. The results are artwork with a dramatic pictorial effect and an unmistakable surface character.
The rainbow also runs through his entire oeuvre as an artistic motif. In 1972, Piene projected a huge rainbow into the night sky for the closing ceremony of the Munich Olympics.
His productive collaboration with technicians and natural scientists opened up new perspectives in the art that still influence artists like Olafur Eliasson today. His works are represented in more than 200 museums and public collections around the world. Important prizes such as the "Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts" of the World Cultural Council praise his work.
Otto Piene lived and worked in Düsseldorf, Cambridge and Groton, Massachusetts, until he died in 2014.
Term for paintings and sculptures that are detached from representational depiction, which spread across the entire western world and parts of the eastern world from around 1910 onwards in ever new stylistic variations. The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, born in 1866, is considered the founder of abstract art. Other important artists of abstract art are K.S. Malewitsch, Piet Mondrian, and others.
A one-of-a-kind or unique piece is a work of art personally created by the artist. It exists only once due to the type of production (oil painting, watercolour, drawing, lost-wax sculpture etc.).
In addition to the classic unique pieces, there are also the so-called "serial unique pieces". They present a series of works with the same colour, motif and technique, manually prepared by the same artist. The serial unique pieces are rooted in "serial art", a genre of modern art that aims to create an aesthetic effect through series, repetitions, and variations of the same objects or themes or a system of constant and variable elements or principles.
The historical starting point is considered to be Claude Monet's "Les Meules" (1890/1891), where, for the first time, a series was created that went beyond a mere group of works. The other artists, who addressed to the serial art, include Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian and above all Gerhard Richter.