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PostWar & Contemporary
3438*
OTTO PIENE(Laasphe 1928 - 2014 Berlin)
Das Schwarz ist heiss. 1967.
Gouache, pigment and fire on cardboard,
firmly laid on fibreboard.
Signed and dated lower right: Piene 67,
also titled lower left: „Das Schwarz ist
heiss“.
66 x 92.5 cm.
Provenance: European private collection.
„What is a picture? A picture is a force
field, an arena where the author’s ener-
gies meet, are melted, poured into the
movements of colour, received from the
depth of the universe, conducted into the
capillaries of the open soul of the viewer.“
(Otto Piene 1959,cit.: Künstler Kritisches
Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, Ed. 13, p. 2).
When Otto Piene, pioneer of Light and Fire
art, took up the post of visiting professor
at the University of Pennsylvania, USA in
1964, he was already highly recognised
and valued in Germany as co-founder of
the artist group ZERO. The group, which
he founded in 1957 together with Heinz
Mack, postulated a radical fresh start for
art after the war. Instead of using paint
and brushes, Zero artists experimented
with newmaterials and with the elemen-
tal powers of nature: light, movement,
wind, fire, air, energy. New and spectacular
creative processes emerged from this:
nailing (Uecker, Aubertin); painting with
smoke and fire (Piene, Aubertin); cutting
and piercing canvases (Piene and Fontana);
filing aluminium (Mack). A new identity had
developed in relation to the reproduction
of nature and its phenomena. Nature was
no longer to be reproduced as a copy, but
in fact used as a means of expression by
the artist. Artists would then free themsel-
ves yet further from the classical painting
process: the creative process would
become a “performance of creation”, as it
was named in the 3rd edition of the Zero
journal. The act of creating would become
the art, just as much as the end product of
the process.
Otto Piene first approached the element
of fire as creative material through his
smoke drawings. The smoke took on the
function of paint. At the beginning of the
1960s, however, he went further, allowing
the fire itself to create the form of the pic-
ture. During the short process of burning,
the flammable paint would coagulate on
the picture surface, forming, colouring and
transforming it. After the flame had been
extinguished, the autonomously created
structure would be finally secured, and
hence the organic process of nature would
be brought into opposition with a cont-
rolled artistic intervention, using various
creative tools and resulting in a synthesis.
The “hand” of the artist is replaced by the
natural elements.
In the powerful work “Das Schwarz ist
heiss” (the black is hot) both the choice
of title and the colour combination of red
and black make reference to the creative
process. In the present work, this explicit
reference to fire and the related pheno-
mena of transformation, destruction, soot
and heat, skilfully combine Piene’s artistic
goals. Only the incline and the distance of
the canvas from the source of the fire, as
well as the moment when the burning pro-
cess was brought to an end, were actively
determined by the artist, so that the full
force of the fire is brought to bear within
the picture.
CHF 25 000 / 40 000
(€ 23 150 / 37 040)