1957–1966 · Artist group

Zero

In the late 1950s, two young painters in Düsseldorf wanted to start again from zero. Instead of dark, gestural pictures, they showed light, movement and pure white. Their shared studio gave rise to Zero, a network of artists stretching from Amsterdam, Milan and Paris to New York.

Art for one evening

Düsseldorf, 1957. In their shared studio, the young painters Heinz Mack and Otto Piene showed pictures, their own and those of artist friends. Each exhibition was open for just one evening. There was no gallery, no dealer, no museum, only guests, conversation and pictures on the walls. These “evening exhibitions” gave rise to one of the most important German art movements of the post-war era.

In 1958 the first issue of a magazine appeared that gave the group its name: ZERO. Two further issues followed by 1961.

Why zero?

In the 1950s, Art Informel dominated painting in West Germany: gestural, often dark pictures in which the artist expressed himself with brush and palette knife. Mack and Piene were looking for something else. Piene described Zero as “a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning”. The word recalls the countdown before a rocket launch, the moment when something new begins.

The focus was no longer on the artist’s handwriting but on what a picture does with light and space. Many Zero works are white or monochrome; they consist of grids, reliefs and structures that look different depending on how the light falls.

Light, smoke and nails

Heinz Mack worked with aluminium and glass. His light reliefs and rotors cast reflections and shimmer into the room. Otto Piene painted through screen stencils, later also with smoke and fire, and developed light ballets in which moving lamps send points of light wandering across walls and ceilings.

Günther Uecker, who had already exhibited with the group, officially joined in 1961. From 1956 he drove nails into canvases and objects, usually painting them white. Depending on the viewpoint and the light, the fields of nails seem to move like a cornfield in the wind.

A network without borders

Zero soon became more than a Düsseldorf group. In Paris, Yves Klein painted his pictures in a single blue of his own devising. In Milan, Lucio Fontana slashed canvases and Piero Manzoni created white Achromes. In the Netherlands, Armando, Henk Peeters, Jan Schoonhoven and herman de vries founded the Nul group in 1961.

In 1959 the exhibition “Vision in Motion – Motion in Vision” at the Hessenhuis in Antwerp brought many of these artists together on a larger scale for the first time. Through Henk Peeters, contact was made with the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which showed a large exhibition of the international movement in 1962. In 1965 the Milanese artist Nanda Vigo organised a Zero exhibition in Fontana’s studio.

The Light Room at documenta

In 1964 Mack, Piene and Uecker were invited to documenta III in Kassel. They were outraged that Lucio Fontana had not been invited. In response, they jointly built a dark room with light machines whose moving patterns of light travel across the walls: Light Room (Homage to Fontana). It is the only joint work by the three. Since 1992 it has belonged to the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, where it is on view in the collection today.

After Zero

In 1966/67 the three ended their collaboration, and their paths diverged widely. From 1974 to 1990 Otto Piene directed the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and created huge floating sculptures as “Sky Art”, such as the Olympic Rainbow for the closing of the 1972 Munich Games. He died in Berlin in 2014, shortly after the opening of his major exhibition More Sky at the Neue Nationalgalerie. Günther Uecker became world-famous for his nail pictures and died in Düsseldorf in 2025, aged 95. Heinz Mack continued his work with light, colour and large light steles.

Late recognition

For a long time Zero stood in the shadow of Pop Art and other American movements. Since the 1990s the movement has been rediscovered. In 2006 the Kunstpalast mounted a large survey exhibition. In 2008 Mack, Piene and Uecker, together with the Kunstpalast, founded the ZERO foundation in Düsseldorf, which preserves the movement’s archive. In 2014 the Guggenheim Museum in New York devoted the exhibition “ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s” to Zero, which then travelled to the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Why it still matters

Zero discovered light as an artistic material and set the viewer in motion: many works change as soon as you walk past them. This makes Zero one of the pioneers of light art, kinetic art and installation. And through Zero, Düsseldorf became a place where international art was made after the war, not merely shown.