Picture "Eye" (1963) (Unique piece)
Picture "Eye" (1963) (Unique piece)
Quick info
unique piece | signed | dated | mixed media on wove paper | framed | size 34 x 42 cm
Detailed description
Picture "Eye" (1963) (Unique piece)
Gouache, pigment, pencil and fire on wove paper, 1963, signed and dated. Motif size/sheet size 17.3 x 25.2 cm. Size in frame 34 x 42 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.
Graphic artwork in the making of which the artist combines at least two graphic techniques.
A one-of-a-kind or unique piece is a work of art that has been personally created by the artist. It exists only once due to the type of production (oil painting, watercolours, drawing, etc.).
In addition to the classic unique pieces, there exist the so-called "serial unique pieces". They present a series of works with the same colour, motif and technique, manually prepared by the same artist. The serial unique pieces are rooted in "serial art", a type of modern art, that aims to create an aesthetic effect through series, repetitions and variations of the same objects or themes or a system of constant and variable elements or principles.
In the history of arts, the starting point of this trend was the work "Les Meules" (1890/1891) by Claude Monet, in which for the first time a series was created that went beyond a mere group of works. The other artists, who addressed to the serial art, include Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian and above all Gerhard Richter.