Picture "Addis Abeba" (1972)
Picture "Addis Abeba" (1972)
Quick info
limited, 90 copies | numbered | signed | screenprint | framed | size 151 x 101 cm
Detailed description
Picture "Addis Abeba" (1972)
Otto Piene created his screenprint series "Addis Ababa" in 1972 for the capital of Ethiopia. The motifs are reminiscent of iridescent flowers and refer to the figurative name of the capital Addis Ababa: "New Flower".
Screenprint, 1972. Edition: 90 copies numbered with Arabic numerals, signed. Motif size/sheet size 146 x 96 cm. Size in frame 151 x 101 cm as shown.
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 the representational depiction, which spread throughout the entire western 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.
The field of graphic arts, that includes artistic representations, which are reproduced by various printing techniques.
Printmaking techniques include woodcuts, copperplate engraving, etching, lithography, serigraphy.