Conservation
Otto Piene and the Harvard Art Museums
The Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, MA, was gifted Otto Piene’s sketchbooks and papers, and has been conserving and processing the images into a publicly accessible collection.
In 2022, more than 70 of Piene’s sketchbooks were digitized and transformed into an innovative display that reconfigured the pages in response to search terms. An interactive mural was available to visitors at the Museum.
Learn more about the exhibit on the Harvard Art Museums’ website:
Processing the Page: Computer Vision and Otto Piene’s Sketchbooks
July 5, 2022–July 31, 2022, Lightbox Gallery, Harvard Art Museums
Otto Piene, Sketchbooks, Harvard Art Museums, 2022
Wall text:
Otto Piene
German (Laasphe, Westphalia 1928-2014 Berlin)
Sketchbooks, 1975-2013
Mixed media on paper
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Elizabeth Goldring Piene, 2019.45.26, 2019.46.4, 2019.36.73, 2019.8.60
Otto Piene was a pioneer in multimedia and technology-based art. In addition to developing projects ranging from fire paintings and kinetic light sculptures to immersive environments and monumental inflatable objects, he continuously maintained a sketching practice. For Piene, sketching was essential to harnessing "traces and forms of human energy."
The sketchbooks on view, selected from over 70 in the Busch-Reisinger Museum's collection, offer insight into this format as an intimate site of creation. Using his favored tool-the commercial marker-Piene created vibrant and dynamic sketches rendered with immediacy: orbs bursting across the seams, rainbow-colored arcs bleeding into the paper fiber, animated designs for commissions and public events. Many of these sketches reveal the formal and conceptual ambitions of Piene's
"Sky Art"—a term he coined in 1969 to encapsulate the inflatable sculptures, performances, and ephemeral events aimed at extending art's reach toward the celestial.
Piene strove to expand art's forms as well as its modes of authorship. Artists such as Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, whose work is on display nearby, shared his interest in experimentation with new media and the communal nature of performance. In a sketch of his Sky Art collaboration with Moorman, Piene depicts the artist, an avant-garde cellist, harnessed and lifted by loops of helium-filled, polyethylene tubes, as if she and her instrument have transformed into one vibratory, musical force.
Explore the Otto Piene Collection on the Harvard Art Museums website
Archive & Catalogue Raisonné of Otto Piene Works
A comprehensive, annotated listing of all the known works of Otto Piene is being compiled by Julia Schleicher in Berlin. The catalogue raisonné is undertaken by the Otto Piene estate under the direction of Sprüth Magers with initial sponsoring from More Sky. The farm in Groton houses a number of Otto Piene works and his working spaces, studio and fire studio.
