Otto Piene – Lightspace
Tuesday, 28 March 2006
Lightspace 1957-2001 – Otto Piene
In 1959 Otto Piene created ‘archaic light ballets’ based on torches and perforated cardboard, later on, in 1960, he produced a ‘mechanical light ballet’ requiring visitors to operate cranks to set ‘light objects’ to slowly move and provide a projection montage. Even later things seem to have got more mechanical, with the use of electrically powered dynamos in his ‘Automatic light ballet’.
In 2001 the Kunstmuseum Celle Mit Sammlung Robert Simon staged an exhibition of these kinds of works called Lightspace 1957-2001
The walls appear as distorted galaxies and refracted cosmos’s where lattices of light are projected from primitive shapes.
Spotted at the intriguing and fascinating ‘Space is the place – Art in the age of Orbitization’
No. 1 — March 28th, 2006 at 9:52 pm
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin has one of Piene’s light boxes. I didn’t know his work from before, so I was very struck by it.
Nicola Schöffer did some similar work with boxes he called Minieffet, see this link and the blog post I wrote about it.
No. 2 — March 29th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
heh marius, thanx for the link….id like to check out the The Neue Nationalgalerie next time im passing through Berlin…
Enjoying the Schoffer and was particularly struck by the lightwall