PURCHASE, N.Y. — About halfway through the 20th century, the international postwar artists who called themselves the Zero Group tried to hit the reset button. As they saw it, modern art had been irretrievably damaged by two world wars. The only thing to do was start over.
“The Art of Zero: Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker and Friends,” at the Neuberger Museum of Art, takes us back to that clean-slate moment. Its artworks soothe and pacify with flickering lights, gentle kinetic movements and endless variations on the white-on-white monochrome.
This concise 22-piece survey also whets the appetite for the Guggenheim’s big fall exhibition “Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s,” opening in early October, the latest effort by American museums and galleries to address this branch of the postwar avant-garde. (Just last year, the Guggenheim explored the Zero-related Gutai movement.) Founded in Düsseldorf in 1957 by Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker, Zero was at heart a reaction to (some might say a repression of) Germany’s role in the Second World War. The word “zero” expressed, in Piene’s words, “a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning.” It had a major impact on a slightly younger generation of German artists, such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, who looked askance at Zero’s ethos of renewal and clarity (even while taking to heart its aversion to Expressionism). But the movement was not exclusive to Germany; it crossed borders, linking up with French Nouveau Réalisme, Italian Arte Povera and American Minimalism.
Photo
More recently, Zero works have been turning up in droves at art fairs and in commercial galleries. (You suspect that this has as much to do with the clean, design-friendly look of the work as with its historical importance.)
Contemporary artists have also gravitated to Zero Group techniques, making rigorously formal abstract “paintings” with quasi-industrial materials like wood, nails and fabric. A sense of context has been lost, along with some of the more transient aspects of the movement: the manifestoes and one-day exhibitions, the use of ephemeral substances like light and smoke.
The small Neuberger show, organized by Avis Larson, the museum’s assistant curator, can’t quite recreate the Zero Group atmosphere. But it’s an unexpectedly rich, artist-driven selection. The works are drawn mainly from a subset of the Neuberger’s collection, the George and Edith Rickey Collection of Constructivist Art, assembled by Rickey, the American kinetic sculptor, and his wife. Many of the works on view were received as gifts or in exchange for artworks by Rickey; a few are personally inscribed.
Several are kinetic works powered by motors or magnets or both. (Most are timed to go off on the hour and the half-hour.) One or two need to be activated by the guard, like Hans Haacke’s “Slow Bubble” (1964-68), a small Plexiglas column containing a bubble of air trapped in a thick liquid; when the column is upended, the bubble rises.
Photo
The show has an enchanting set piece, a blue-walled gallery holding three works that twinkle, rotate and squirm. One is a newly restored light piece by Piene, which has not been seen in three decades; titled “Neon Medusa” (1969), it’s a spherical arrangement of 449 orange glow lamps (each one attached to a single gooseneck rod). The lamps, on timers, blink on and off so as to create varying impressions of sculptural volume.
It’s shown alongside a smaller light work by Piene, the pierced-brass ball “Little Light Satellite (Honolulu Model),” and Gianni Colombo’s elegant “Lo Spazio Elastico” (a suspended wire cube that becomes an animated wall projection with the help of motors and a spotlight).
Surrounding this room are paintings by Zero artists and their associates. A couple of works remind you that some “friends” of the movement are much better known today than its official founders; a Lucio Fontana “Spatial Concept” from 1968 — a pristine white canvas with three long vertical slashes — is prominently installed at the show’s entrance. (In the same firmament as Fontana, though not represented here, are Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni.)
Many other names, however, will seem relatively fresh to American viewers. One of the most astonishing works is a sensual twist on the monochrome grid painting by the Nul (Dutch for zero) artist Henk Peeters, made of cotton balls flattened by a thin veil of white silk.
Another rediscovery is the Brazilian artist Almir Mavignier, whose small, precise, optically confounding abstractions are among the few works in the show to use bright color and actual paint. Like the show’s other Latin American artists, the Venezuelan Jesús Rafael Soto and the Argentine Luis Tomasello, Mavignier became affiliated with Zero while working in Paris in the 1950s.
It will take a bigger show, like the Guggenheim’s, to map out the various global branches and offshoots of Zero. But “The Art of Zero” is an excellent primer, with enough urgency and dynamism to capture a moment compared by Piene to “the countdown when rockets take off.”