Sale: 540 / Evening Sale, June 09. 2023 in Munich Lot 7

 

7
Otto Piene
Ohne Titel, 1967.
Mixed media with oil and fire on canvas
Estimate:
€ 120,000 / $ 129,600
Sold:
€ 177,800 / $ 192,024

(incl. surcharge)
Ohne Titel. 1967.
Mixed media with oil and fire on canvas.
Signed and dated on the reverse. 68 x 96 cm (26.7 x 37.7 in).

• Remarkably clear fire picture with powerful, glowing colors.
• Characteristic work from the artist's early creative phase, during which Piene used fire to create circular formations on a monochrome ground.
• There is hardly any other œuvre in which fire plays such an important role than it is the case with Otto Piene's – it gained an almost iconographic status.
• The year our work was made, the Museum Ostwall in Dortmund hosted the first retrospective with works by the great "ZERO" artist
.

PROVENANCE: Private collection North Rhine-Westphalia.
Private collection Bremen.

As of 1959, Otto Piene made first artworks in which he used fire as a creative element of his art in a broader sense: he invented the so-called smoke drawings, in which he used the soot of candles or kerosene lamps to leave traces on the image carrier. From this time on, fire, and the examination of light and the elements in general, became established as the key leitmotif of his art, which is still seminal in this regard today. The artist's hand is almost completely excluded from the production process, and hardly comes into contact with the image carrier at all. The only things the artist determines are the distance and the inclination of the canvas to the fire, as well as the point at which the fire is extinguished to mark the end of the burning process. This way, the direct effect of the fire are blisters and crusts, which initially appear as circular shapes in front of a monochrome background. The associative content thus conveyed is emphasized by the similarity of these forms to cosmic phenomena and celestial bodies, adding a further level of interpretation to the one-of-a-kind creations of the "ZERO" artist. Movement in space thus appears as a further fundamental level of Piene's art, which seeks to mediate between man, nature and technology.

Fire as a destructive and at the same time creative element is used in the exposed center of the present work "Untitled" (1967). The deep black and the bright red-orange symbolize fire and the manufacturing process itself. As if looking into the center of a blazing flame, the red seems to make the observer feel the heat of the fire. With this phenomenon, the special aesthetics of the surface formed by the fire demonstrate the apparent contradiction that destruction and beauty are often closely related. It is only through the supposed destruction of the canvas that new artistic creation becomes possible.

In this early work, Piene stages a wildly blazing, powerful state of nature in an outstanding manner, which he locates in a cosmic order through the balanced composition. The mediation of man, nature and technology reaches a glowing, luminous peak in this fire picture. [AM]



7
Otto Piene
Ohne Titel, 1967.
Mixed media with oil and fire on canvas
Estimate:
€ 120,000 / $ 129,600
Sold:
€ 177,800 / $ 192,024

(incl. surcharge)