Page 24 - Studio International - July 1965

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1
Jesus Raphael Soto
Three blue cubes 1962
100 x 100 cm.
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld
2
Yves Klein
Red monochrome 1957
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld
( Reproduced by courtesy of
the museum)
3
Otto Piene
Classical Light Ballet 1961
Projected on ceiling at
Schloss Morsbroich, Leverkusen
4
Otto Piene at work
on a Fire Painting
5
Otto Piene
Exotic Fira Flower

2
Mc Roberts and Tunnard gave Piene a show the follow­
ing October. This was the forerunner of Zero in London
in 1964 and in New York in 1965. Meanwhile, a good
deal else had happened In 1962 the tendency had a
whole set of international exhibitions. These ranged
from NUL in Amsterdam, with a salon de lumiere by
Mack, Piene, Uecker, through 'Vibration' in Antwerp,
'Forum 62' in Ghent, 'Neue Tendenzen' at the Hague to
'Dynamo' in Brussels. The first Zero film, 0 x O = Kunst
was made by Gerd Winkler for the Frankfort Television
Studios. In January 1963 Dr. Paul Wember, who had
shown Yves Klein and Tinguely for the first time in a
museum (and been half skinned by local papers) made
the first Zero retrospective in Krefeld. The following
June the group won its first international prize, sharing
it with grupo n of Milan at the San Marino Biennale.
And as a fitting climax, following the second New
Tendencies in Yugoslavia a congress of purification
was held. All three Zero artists were here purged for
inconsistency and 'failure to grasp the problem'­
though the Nota comrades from Munich remained.
Henceforward the Dusseldorf painters are known
officially as '/es exclus de Zagreb'.
This truly crushing blow has a significance. Piene's
distinction of Zero from the others is not just theoretical.
It shows in the results. At least since 1962 a new
development is visible. Uecker's nailed boards, first
sternly geometrical, had taken on the rhythms and the
sensuality which made some London critics think of
growing corn. In Piene's Fauna and Flora the explora­
tion of pictorial space through light-vibration con­
ceived, as it were, organic form. The word becomes
flesh-if in a slightly different meaning from the
biblical. Mack has developed slowest on this line. But
in the Zero exhibition which opened at the start of May
in Hanover, he has constructions in aluminium honey­
comb which are translations of the forms of fish and
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