Black Air
Group Exhibition
Casino Luxembourg
Through January 5, 2025

In October 2024 Amelia LiCavoli will guest curate a group exhibition which will directly immerse visitors within Black Air. The namesake of the exhibition is the featured reactivation of Aldo Tambellini and Otto Piene’s 1968 electromedia installation, which will be joined by additional installations and performances by contemporary artists such as Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) and Ayako Kato, and a publication created in collaboration with Ibrahim R. Ineke. Visitors will be invited to adapt their sensorial perceptions and to heighten their awareness of the immaterial energy that is constantly moving through everything – the atoms of our bodies, the technology of artistic media, and the universe.   

The Flowers of Evil
Group Exhibition
Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Through May 4, 2025

Starting with Odilon Redon’s charcoal drawing Fleur du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1880) in the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, this exhibition traces a path from early modern art to contemporary works, shedding light on the influence that Charles Baudelaire’s well-known, eponymous collection of poems has had on art. Alongside a selection of works directly related to the poems, such as Hannah Höch’s painting Les Fleurs du mal (1922–24) and Albert Birkle’s work Die kleinen Alten (1923), the exhibition also addresses individual topics such as beauty and decay or artifice and nature. The exhibition features around 120 works. In addition to paintings, drawings, and graphic art, the exhibition includes photographs, film clips, and digital media, as well as objects and installations.

Electric Dreams
Group Exhibition
Tate Modern, London
Through June 1, 2025

From the birth of op art to the dawn of cybernetics, artists found new ways to engage the senses and play with our perception. Electric Dreams celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who pioneered a new era of immersive sensory installations and automatically-generated works. This major exhibition brings together groundbreaking works by a wide range of international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation. Experience the psychedelic environments they created in the 1950s and 60s, built using mathematical principles, motorized components and new industrial processes. See how radical artists embraced the birth of digital technology in the 1970s and 1980s, experimenting with machine-made art and early home computing systems.

20/20 Vision – The Collection Remixed
Collection Presentation
Kunsthalle Bremen, Der Kunstverein in Bremen

With the title “20/20 Vision: The Collection Remixed", the Kunsthalle Bremen presents a radical new look at its collection for the first time in nearly ten years. Using bold colors on the walls, an elaborate staging and an entirely new arrangement of the works on display, the exhibition allows surprising new aesthetic experiences. Descriptions of all works on display provide in-depth information, some of which are findings from the very latest research. Several works have not been seen in public in decades. The installation will also present for the first time a number of recent acquisitions, donations, and permanent loans. Works of art created after 1945 will also be given a greater presence.

Otto Piene
The Proliferation of the Sun
May 24–August 10, 2024
Los Angeles

Otto Piene (1928–2014), cofounder of the ZERO group and longtime director of MIT’s influential Center for Advanced Visual Studies, combined art and technology in works that comprised light rooms, inflatable sculptures, ceramics, drawings, paintings and performances. Colorful and dynamic, they consistently engage the viewer’s perception and participation. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Piene’s monumental, immersive installation The Proliferation of the Sun (1967/2014) at the Los Angeles gallery, marking the artist’s first solo presentation on the West Coast. Featuring seven digital projections of hand-painted slides and a soundtrack of the artist’s voice directing them, the work envelops visitors and the gallery in shifting prismatic tones that generate, in Piene’s words, a “poetic journey through space.”

Mies in Mind
John Bock, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Jenny Holzer, Kraftwerk, Reinhard Mucha, Otto Piene, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Scheibitz
August 20–September 4, 2021
Berlin

As part of the exhibition parcours Mies In Mind, initiated by INDEX Berlin and taking place on the occasion of the reopening of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Sprüth Magers is showcasing works by John Bock, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Jenny Holzer, Reinhard Mucha, Otto Piene, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Scheibitz in a group exhibition that pays tribute to the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his famous building.

Air Time
Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene
August 12–September 30, 2021

Otto Piene was an artistic pioneer, from his years as co-founder of the Zero group in Düsseldorf to his massive environmental installations across the United States and Europe. This exhibition explores his Sky Art projects in particular, illuminating their experimental, participatory and collaborative nature. This phase of his work flourished to a large degree through the opportunities and connections he made at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—with artists such as Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman and Elizabeth Goldring—where he was a fellow (1968–74) and later director (1974–94) of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). Some of Piene's most spectacular Sky Art performances were realized in collaboration with fellow artist and life-long friend Charlotte Moorman, who holds a special place in this exhibition.

Otto Piene
February 1–April 6, 2019
Berlin

Otto Piene counts among the pioneers of 20th century art. As co-founder of the international ZERO movement, he had a fundamental impact on how classical art forms such as painting and sculpture are perceived. His early smoke, grid and fire paintings, light ballets and light rooms enabled him to incorporate time, light, space and movement into the production of art.

Otto Piene
Light Ballet
April 29–June 10, 2017
Berlin

Otto Piene’s use of light developed in the late 1950s with works utilising earlier experiments of printing onto canvas using punctured screens of many small holes, producing a grid of small, elevated pigment dots on the surface. These perforated ‘raster sieves’ were used in early works as hand-held tools through which to shine light from candles. This rudimentary apparatus soon developed into more complex means in 1960-61, employing metal screens, discs, motors, timers, and rotating electric lights, coming to a theatrical climax in room size installations. A selection of these elements will be presented in Sprüth Magers collaboration with the Otto Piene Estate, his first exhibition with the gallery, taking the form of a ‘Light Ballet’.