Particularly fascinated by the medium of light, Piene spent his entire career experimenting with it. The Proliferation of the Sun was originally conceived as a multislide projection and performance with Piene’s scripted narration in 1966–67 for the opening of Piene and Aldo Tambellini’s Black Gate Theatre in New York.

The current restaging at the gallery accords with the final iteration of The Proliferation of the Sun, devised by Piene as the centerpiece of his 2014 retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin.

Piene completed the work by adding 160 new slides painted especially for the Berlin staging. These were also digitized and projected onto a large inflatable sphere, inspired by the work’s 1967 presentation at Art Intermedia gallery in Cologne.

The slides display vividly colored organic forms, recalling fractals, planets, and cells reproducing under a microscope, evoking the sun’s vibrance and life-giving energy. In between, perfectly round black dots resembling eclipses materialize.

With increasing speed, the images change to the droning soundtrack of the artist’s voice uttering “The sun, the sun, the sun, the sun”—a sort of ritualistic chant that vibrates through the space and anchors audiences in the present moment.

As the slides end, the space becomes bathed in pure white light while Piene intones “white-out, white-out, white-out.” Possibly playing on its counterpart, the blackout, which plunged cities into darkness during wartime as lights were turned off to make targets less visible to the enemy, or the fade of theater lights to mark a play’s end, Piene surprises viewers with a bright glaring light.

Making the color white tangible, this section of the projection taps into Western ideas of purity and emptiness and the new beginnings associated with them, referencing ZERO’s symbolic indication of beginning at nothing.