Zero,

1966

In 1958, artists Otto Piene and Heinz Mack came together to form the ZERO group, which would grow to include artists such as Günther Uecker and Yves Klein in later years.

In a postwar Germany, with neither museums nor galleries to support them, the artists began holding one-evening art exhibitions for which they penned manifestos. The group saw itself as an aesthetic ground zero, a starting point from which to establish new parameters and invent new techniques. Dissatisfied with painting at the time, the Zero artists sought to extend painting into the third dimension and intensify the effects of light, color, vibration, and movement. In the three works seen here, light’s trajectories are physically marked by the impressions of nails on paper, by its colors drawn out, and by its shimmer made liquid and tangible on a sheet of silver.