Golden rain, 2014

Wall object (ceramic) made of gold on glaze on clay, unique piece

Mass: 63 x 63 x 3 cm

Otto Piene was a co-founder of the international ZERO movement. Making nature the co-author of his artistic works was the primary concern in his work. Piene creates analogue, earthy works and suggests cosmic natural processes. Light is of central importance to him: " ... disturbed by the strange tendency of contemporary art towards opaque darkness, I began in 1957 to paint pictures that should reflect light in as perfect a purity as possible," Piene is quoted as saying in 1965. In 2014 Otto Piene created a series of 4 numbered, unsigned unique pieces that are recorded in the Otto Piene Ceramic Objects Archive under the catalogue raisonné numbers 714 to 717. This work bears the number 716.

Otto Piene was born in 1928 in Laasphe, Westphalia, and died in Berlin in 2014. He studied art and philosophy and in the 1960s, as a co-founder of the international ZERO movement, was decisively involved in the expansion of classical art forms. The Berlin exhibition curator Joachim Jäger called Piene "one of the great art innovators of the 20th century".