painting
Great Sun
Otto Piene
About this work
Object details
- TitleGreat Sun
- Date1965
- Mediumoil on canvas
- Measurements194,5 × 194,5 cm
- Inventory number3196
- Inscriptionsverso, upper middle: piene 65 + four stamps
More about this work
In 1963, a few years after the official launch of their eponymous project, the ZERO artists Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker issued a manifesto titled ZERO – Der neue Idealismus. The new idealism was one of hope and faith in a ‘pure’ art with its gaze fixed on the future. Inspired by the countdown when launching a rocket, ‘zero’ was ‘the incomparable zone in which the old situation switches to the new one’. ZERO promoted an anonymous and almost scientific art in reaction to the (over)emotionalism and gestural brushstrokes of postwar Informalism in Europe and the United States. With nuclei in Düsseldorf, Milan, Antwerp, Paris and Arnhem, ZERO became one of the most networked European neo-avant-garde movements. Monochromatism, serial structures and kinematics were among the principal new artistic methods for the depiction of artistic themes like motion, space and light.
After ZERO, Piene found fame with his Rauchbilder: paintings and drawings made with fire and smoke, which involved him setting light to thin layers of inflammable fixatives on canvas or paper. He manipulated the direction of the flames by taking hold of the corners of the support. He then worked the blackened forms and the space around them with paint or other classical materials. By creating a black circle of smoke around a white centre on a surface painted scarlet with Great Sun, Piene evoked the phenomenological perception that the cleansing fire had cleared the way for the bright white light.
In his trailblazing text of 1958 titled Über die Reinheit des Lichts (On the purity of light), Piene reflected that pure light was an existential source of energy for life and thus for art as well. ‘Light is the primary condition for all visibility. Light is the sphere of colour. Light is the life-substance both of men and painting....Pure light will enable painting to arouse pure feelings.’
Fire is light. Piene equated every pursuit of creation or beauty with playing with fire, literally and figuratively. Creation and destruction were close to each other in the smoke paintings, because they always elicit a form of intensity, a feeling of fascination and fear that is governed by chance. The act of painting and the painting as a formal object are subordinate to ‘setting fire’ to the canvas and experiencing the work of art. In that sense the Rauchbilder were also related to American happenings and the Viennese Actionists of the 1960s.
In 1979-1980 the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp organised the retrospective exhibition Zero International, after which the museum added this Great Sun to its collection, along with other works.
References
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