Exhibition, 7 Oct 2015 - 14 Feb 2016

More than ZERO -– Hans Bischoffshausen and the Avantgarde

Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria

In 1958, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene formed the Düsseldorf ZERO artist group. In 1961, Günther Uecker joined. Zero marked a phase of silence and silence, an intermediate zone in which an old state merges into a new one. Members of the group generated with their kinetic light objects that engage in the room and understand this with a new minimalist aesthetic, which must be set in appearance between painting and sculpture and worked on Op Art and kinetic training. They networked with artists such as Milan's Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein from Paris to create a powerful avant-garde. Early recognition in the museums of Leverkusen (1960) and Amsterdam (1962) has borne fruit. In 1966, the group dissolved after the artistic and biographical paths of its members separated.
 
With his move to Paris in 1959, Hans Bischoffshausen began a new phase of creation. Structure, monochrome and reduction determined his work, and with white-white energy fields he went to the limit of visible. "I am doing the asceticism of the white until the end", the artist has described his intention. His ideal was the image that is no longer photographable. The wavy-soft, oscillating, often evaporating towards the edges of the image, sometimes provided with holes of geschmorten and burns as after a ritual use, fascinates then as now. His material images were created, the surfaces of the image were perforated, burned, the content of the image reduced to the essential. This plastic extension of the surface of the image led to the dissolution of the separation of the image and the space.