Otto Piene - Light is my medium

"Otto Piene was a German kinetic artist and co-founder of the ZERO avant-garde group. A pioneer of media art, Piene worked with light and motion to produce mesmerizing displays, as seen in his Light Ballet (1961). At the core of his practice was the desire to study technological processes and harness them to create a sense of movement. “Light is my medium," Piene declared. “Previously, paintings and sculptures seemed to glow. Now they do.” Born on April 18, 1928 in Bad Laasphe, Germany, he studied at the Academy of Art in Munich and later during the late 1950s at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where he formed Group Zero with Heinz Mack. Piene went on to become the first fellow of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies in 1968, and in 1972 his work Olympic Rainbow accompanied the closing ceremony of the Munich Olympics. Piene went on to serve as the director of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies from 1974 to 1993. The artist died on July 17, 2014 in Berlin, Germany. Today, his works can be found in numerous museum collections around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris."(artnet)

Bernard Aubertin

"Bernard Aubertin was an artist best known for his red monochromatic paintings and association with the ZERO movement. Born in 1934 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, France, he initially studied decorative art until meeting Yves Klein in 1957, who encouraged him toward abstract art. Aubertin’s first monochrome works were created in 1958 and featured canvases covered in materials such as nails, bolts, and screws all painted in red. By 1961, he officially joined the ZERO group, seeking to create a detached, expressionless approach to art making. Later in his career, his practice evolved to incorporate performance, and he became known for setting fire to his own work and exhibiting the remains, as in Livre Brûlé (1974), where the artist set fire to a book and displayed the charred remains of its pages and bindings. In 2009, Aubertin’s work was the subject of an exhibition at the Foundation for Concrete Art in Reutlingen, Germany, the same city where he died on August 31, 2015."(artnet )