Zero (art)

In 1959, artists Pol Bury, Paul van Hoeydonck, Jean Tinguely, and Daniel Spoerri organized Motion in Vision – Vision in Motion, an exhibition at Hessenhuis in Antwerp that for the first time gave ZERO an international audience. This show was the first major ZERO exhibition, after previous shows held at their studio by Heinz Mack and Piene in 1957.

In the early 1960s, the artist Henk Peeters presented the international director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Willem Sandberg, with monochromatic works of the young European artists' generation. In a close exchange with Mack, Piene, and Günther Uecker, as well as Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, the original concept was further developed. This was the result of a 1962 exhibition which, besides monochromy, also concerned itself with color, vibration, light, and movement. There were works by European artists, works from North and South America, as well as from Japan. The exhibition was initiated, organized, and financed by the artists themselves. The selection of the participants took place likewise by the artists, without curatorial assistance. The exhibition was accompanied by a jointly developed catalog.

Between 1993 and 1999, four ZERO exhibitions took place at Galerie Villa Merkel in Esslingen, curated by art historian Renate Wiehager. The exhibition series, which was specific to the NUL Group from the Netherlands, ZERO Italy, and ZERO Paris, was ended in 1999 with the exhibition Zero Deutschland 1960. Apart from the three protagonists of the German ZERO movement, Weihager devoted herself to a further twenty artists whose works ranged from the late 1950s to the 1990s. Unlike in the 1960s, this series of exhibitions was not initiated, organized and financed by the artists. A series of four publications was issued, with a first comprehensive overview of ZERO as a European movement in four languages: German, English, Dutch, and French.

The Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf presented the first overview exhibition of the international ZERO avant-garde in 2006. The exhibition, organized and curated by Jean-Hubert Martin and Mattijs Visser, exhibited paintings and installations by country. Mack, Piene, and Uecker curated their own areas. Henk Peeters, who had organized the historical ZERO exhibitions in 1962 and 1965 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, consulted in the field of design, selection of artists and works. The Düsseldorf exhibition covered several aspects of the exhibitions from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the form of reconstructions of former installations.

In 2006, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg presented 120 works by 50 Zero artists.[5] The works were loaned by the German collectors Gerhard and Anna Lenz, a German couple that was involved with the Zero movement almost from its beginnings.[3] Gerhard Lenz had first encountered the Zero group at an exhibition of Piene’s work in a Düsseldorf bookshop more in 1963. From 1974, the couple exhibited the collection in 12 shows over 25 years, including in Frankfurt, Barcelona, Moscow, and Warsaw.[6]

In 2013, the Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil showcased Zero, the largest exhibition ever held in Brazil featuring this group present works by key artists of the movement, alongside Latin American artists such as Hércules Barzotti, Lygia Clark and Abraham Palatnik from Brazil, Gertrud Goldschmidt (GEGO) from Venezuela, and Gyula Kosice from Argentina, all of whom used the same visual languages than the original members in the same time period. This venue traveled to Iberê Camargo Foundation at Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, and finally was shown in 2014 on Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo at São Paulo, Brazil.[7]

The exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art in 2013 included works from the museum's permanent collection, by artists who were part of or exhibited with Group Zero, including Getulio Alviani, Hartmut Böhm, Enrico Castellani, Gianni Colombo, Lucio Fontana, Heinz Mack, Almir Mavignier, Henk Peeters, Otto Piene, Jesús Rafael Soto, Jean Tinguely, Luis Tomasello, and Günther Uecker.[8]

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum showcased the group’s work in ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s, an exhibition that featured more than 40 artists from over 10 countries.[9] This was the first large-scale historical survey of the group's work in the United States. The exhibition was initiated by the ZERO foundation and toured 2015-16 to the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

An exhibition opened in March 2015 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, conceived and organized jointly by artists and experts in the tradition of the ZERO movement. Various subjects – articulated in time, space, color, reflection, vibration, light, and movement – showed works of art from the central years of the ZERO movement from 1957 to 1967. With around 40 artists, the exhibition followed the ZERO spirit, from two-dimensional paintings to the three-dimensional space. On a total of 3,000 square meters, artists from Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Venezuela, Switzerland, Japan, the US, and Brazil were represented with around 200 works and ten space-filling installations. Among them were some rare works from renowned collections such as the Georges Pompidou Center, the Morsbroich Museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. In addition, for the first time, works by several artists were shown: Manzoni, Verheyen, Fontana, Tinguely, Klein, Mack, and Piene. The highlight of the collaboration was the space-saving historical installation Lichtraum (Hommage à Fontana) by Mack, Piene, and Uecker, which was presented for the first time at the documenta III 1964. Heinz Mack presented an installation as an homage to his already deceased ZERO friends. In the form of a ZERO chronology, the most important exhibitions and events were documented using previously unpublished photo and video material. In addition, the works that had previously been lost in the course of the preparation of the exhibition were still to be seen in this exhibition.

An exhibition titled ZERO: Countdown to the Future was on display at the Multimedia Museum in Moscow, and in Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul, Turkey in 2015.[10]

In 2018, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart Tasmania organized a large show around the theme of "Vibration", with historical old and reconstructed installations, the first time that ZERO shows on the other side of the world. The exhibition included large installations by Enrico Castellani, Gianni Colombo, Heinz Mack, Henk Peeters, Otto Piene, Jesús Rafael Soto, Jean Tinguely, and Günther Uecker. A separate section was, for the first time in a ZERO show, dedicated to "father figures" of the movement: Victor Vasarely, Marcel Duchamp, and Lucio Fontana. [11]

The foundation has important works mainly from Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, and other artists from the ZERO movement.

The ZERO foundation was established in 2008 by the Düsseldorf ZERO artists Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker together with the Museum Kunstpalast. Its founding mission was to preserve, present, study, and support the work of the international ZERO movement.

For this purpose, the artists donated numerous works and their archives from the ZERO period, including important documents such as photographs, correspondence, posters, invitations, press articles, and magazines. Over the last few years additional works and documents of the international ZERO avantgarde have been collected and made available to the public and international scholars through the development of exhibition projects and publications. These efforts are not only focused on the ZERO period itself (1958-1966) but also on the continuing impact of ZERO into present. The archive and library of the ZERO foundation are available for research purposes.

A unique aspect of the ZERO foundation is that the living artists are actively involved in the work of the organization. First-hand information about the ZERO period can be passed on and integrated into scholarship on the movement.

Visser went on to found the 0-Institute,[17] focused on presenting the works and documents of international artists associated with the ZERO movement in a contemporary context.