ARTES BERLIN ∙ Auguststraße 19 ∙ 10117 Berlin
OPENING HOURS:
Tuesday to Friday: 11 am to 6 pm
Saturday: 12 pm to 6 pm, and by appointment
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ZERO+
17 July - 11 September 2021
Zero is the silence. Zero is the origin. Zero is round. Zero rotates. Zero is the moon...
The exhibition brings together over 30 works, including unique pieces, editions, and collectors' items by the fathers of the ZERO movement Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Günther Uecker, as well as their contemporaries such as Adolf Luther, Hermann Goepfert, Lucio Fontana, and Nanda Vigo.
The exhibition ZERO+ expands the positions with works by contemporary artists Wolfgang Flad, Fabian Gatermann, Willi Siber, Thomas Röthel, Dachroth + Jeschonnek, Andreas Bausch and Mandy Wiesener, who work conceptually and stylistically in a comparable manner, bringing the idea into the present with new techniques and media. The exhibited objects share clear and reduced imagery.
The aesthetic and creative diversity ranges from lens objects, coloured ceramic fields, nail trees and embossed prints to lithography and serigraphy, mobile, mixed media and installation to assemblage and collage. Taken together, the monochrome and sometimes polychrome objects examine predominantly German art production of the last 60 years, documenting an evolution, a departure, and a return of design principles and perspectives.
In 1958, Mack and Piene founded the group ZERO in Düsseldorf, Germany, with Uecker joining in 1961. They sought a new beginning free from the burdens of the past, the "zero hour," and broke with traditional ideas of art and the narrative of Art Informel and Tachism. The classical painting was declared dead, replaced by a creative process involving media such as fire, reflection, light, and shadow.
ZERO became one of the most significant avant-garde movements of the 20th century, continuing to consciously and unconsciously influence artists to this day.
The sun is Zero. Zero is white. The Zero desert. The sky above Zero. The night –. Zero flows. The eye Zero. Navel. Mouth. Kiss. The Milk is round. The flower Zero the bird. Silent. Floating. I eat Zero, I drink Zero, I sleep Zero, I wake Zero, I love Zero.... reads the group's manifesto, written by Piene, Mack and Uecker in 1963.
The artists of the ZERO movement and the contemporary environment also practice a form of kinetic art, with light, space, and movement being their fundamental components. What began in 1958 with the "zero hour" has the effect of a canonised idea that extends to the present.
