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Clouds on Silver 2 (Sky Art X) from the portfolio Sky Art
1969 · Lithograph with Fasson aluminum foil chine collé, from a portfolio of twenty-five lithographs
sheet: 35 × 25" (88.9 × 63.5 cm)
Museum of Modern Art
WATTS INDEXThe canonical database of visual culture
Otto Piene
Artist
SculptureExpressionismPerformance ArtKinetic Art
Representation
None documented
2
Institutional Exhibitions
45
Works in Collection
92
Assets Indexed
0
Authority-backed Facts
0
Publications Referenced
90%
Profile Completeness
Cultural Positioning
Movements
- • Expressionism
- • Performance Art
- • Kinetic Art
Related Artists
No edges recorded
Influence Graph
No influence edges encoded yet.
Selected Institutional Exhibitions
View all exhibitions →No image
Video Art: A History
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1983–1984
No image
Recent Acquisitions
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1961–1962
About
Why this artist matters now
Otto Piene was a German artist and founder of the Zero movement, which emerged in postwar Düsseldorf as a radical rejection of gestural abstraction and war-inflected expressionism. Working primarily with light, smoke, and kinetic forms, he created immersive environments and performances that dematerialized the art object itself. His light ballets and sky events transformed industrial and natural spaces into fields of perception, while his pneumatic and kinetic sculptures explored movement as a sculptural material. Piene's practice extended from gallery installations to monumental public works, establishing light and ephemeral phenomena as central to postwar artistic inquiry.
Source: Moma Bulk 2026 05 04 · Trust score: 92% · Updated 25d ago
Graph relationships
Taste overlap and adjacency
Movement
Expressionism
Medium
Sculpture
Related Artists
12 in graph
Institutional
Museum Collections
Canonical record
Artworks (45)
View all 45 artworks →
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Images
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Record
Movements and affiliations
Institutional
Representation & Collections
In collection
Museum of Modern Art
New York, US
In collection
Art Institute of Chicago
In collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Market
Auction sale history
Houses that have sold works by this artist at auction
Record