yellow-red fruit, 1963

Painting as mixed media on cardboard, unique specimen

Dimensions: 50 x 73 cm

As a co-founder of the international ZERO movement, Otto Piene was always concerned in his art to return man to nature. The naturalness that is often found in his works in the form of fruits, seeds or blossoms testifies to Piene's appreciation of nature, but "without being an imitator, i.e. a blind naturalist" - according to the artist in a catalogue text on the occasion of his exhibition at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, 1963.

Otto Piene was born in 1928 in Laasphe, Westphalia, and died in Berlin in 2014. He studied art and philosophy and, as a co-founder of the international ZERO movement, played a decisive role in the expansion of classical art forms in the 1960s. In the 1970s, Piene headed a media laboratory for artistic-optical experiments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Berlin exhibition curator Joachim Jäger called Piene "one of the great art innovators of the 20th century".