Zero & Friends

1 The Sperone Westwater show was a compact reformulation of “Zero: International Avantgarde of the Fifties and Sixties,” a 2006 exhibition organized for museums in Düsseldorf and Saint-Etienne by Visser with Jean-Hubert Martin and Heike van den Valentyn. 

2 Writing in the New York Times, Apr. 17, 1966, Grace Glueck called the show “a dazzler that combines jet-age materials and know-how with the ’thirties stardust of a Busby Berkeley movie.” Reprinted in Mackazin, the Years 1957-67 (no date), “published by Mack for Mack” and distributed in New York by Howard Wise Gallery and in Düsseldorf by Galerie Schmela. 

3 From Mack’s statements at the Zero 50th Anniversary Symposium, Mar. 22, 2008, moderated by Joe Ketner, held at the Milwaukee Art Museum in conjunction with the exhibition “Sensory Overload: Light, Motion, Sound, and the Optical in Art Since 1945.” The exhibition included works by Piene, Mack and Lucio Fontana. 

4 “Paris on the Rhine,” Time, June 2, 1967, accessed online at www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,902071,00.html. 

5 Otto Piene in conversation with the author, Dec. 3, 2008. 

6 The energetic and adventurous Schmela (1918-1980) would later mount solo shows by Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys and Jörg Immendorff, among many others. Schmela’s daughter, Ulrike, now runs the space as Galerie Ulrike Schmela and plans to relocate the operation to Berlin. The first venue for Informel in Düsseldorf, Jean-Pierre Wilhelm’s Galerie 22, opened about two weeks before Schmela in 1957. 

7 Statements at 2008 Milwaukee symposium.  

8 All three issues are reprinted in Zero, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1973. In addition to the original illustrations and German texts, this volume contains English translations and an introduction by Lawrence Alloway. 

9 Within a few years, Klüver would collaborate with Robert Rauschenberg and others on EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology). 

10 Wise, an enthusiastic supporter of experimental media, operated his gallery from 1960 to 1970, and in 1971 founded Electronic Arts Intermix. In his review of the 1964 Zero show for Arts magazine (January 1965), Donald Judd opined that “in general the work is unusual and unlike anything here,” and proclaimed Mack the most original of the three. “Mack, Piene, Uecker” is reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975, Halifax, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2005, p. 157. 

11 Wulf Herzogenrath, Otto Piene: Solo, Düsseldorf, Halle 6—Galerie Christine Hölz, 2006. 

12 Otto Piene in conversation with the author.  13 Ibid.

“ZERO in New York” was on view at Sperone Westwater, New York [Nov. 6-Dec. 20, 2008]. It was accompanied by a book published by MER Paper Kunsthalle, edited by Mattijs Visser, with essays by Catherine Millet and Valerie Hillings and texts by Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Yves Klein. “ZERO Lives—European Avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s” is on view at the Kunsthalle Weishaupt Ulm, Germany through June 7, 2009. Many of the Zero artists are represented in “In-Finitum” at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, Italy [June 6-Nov. 15]. “Manzoni: A Retrospective” was on view at Gagosian Gallery, New York [Jan. 24-Mar. 21], and “Enrico Castellani” is at Haunch of Venison, New York [May 11-June 27].

Stephen Maine is an artist and writer wholives in Brooklyn.