OTTO PIENE German, 1928-2014

Otto Piene was a German kinetic artist and co-founder of the ZERO avant-garde group. A pioneer of media art, Piene worked with light and motion to produce mesmerizing displays, as seen in his Light Ballet (1961). At the core of his practice was the desire to study technological processes and harness them to create a sense of movement. “Light is my medium," Piene declared. “Previously, paintings and sculptures seemed to glow. Now they do.” Born on April 18, 1928 in Bad Laasphe, Germany, he studied at the Academy of Art in Munich and later during the late 1950s at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where he formed Group Zero with Heinz Mack. Piene went on to become the first fellow of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1968, and in 1972 his work Olympic Rainbow accompanied the closing ceremony of the Munich Olympics. Piene went on to serve as the director of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies from 1974 to 1993. The artist died on July 17, 2014 in Berlin, Germany. Today, his works can be found in numerous museum collections around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.