A founder of the influential Zero Group in the late 1950s, Otto Piene forged an artistic career marked by constant experimentation across diverse media, including kinetic light sculptures and installations, smoke and fire paintings, ceramics, and monumental inflatables that have soared in performances and events worldwide. Characterized by a combination of art and technology, as well as an interest in ritual, performance and communal experience, his work demands that viewers play an active role in the artwork. Piene was also a keen philosophical thinker, penning notable essays about art and perception.

Otto Piene (1928–2014) was born in Germany and spent the latter half of his life dividing his time between the United States and Europe, directing the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for two decades. Selected recent solo exhibitions include Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2020), Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen (2019/2020), Fitchburg Art Museum (2019), Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (2015), Kunsthalle Bremen (2015), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2014), ZKM, Karlsruhe (2013) and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2011). Selected group exhibitions include Centre Pompidou-Metz (2021), Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo (2020), Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf (2018), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (2017), Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2015), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014), Bienal de São Paulo (1985), Venice Biennale (1971, 1967), and Documenta 6, 3 and 2 (1977, 1964, 1959). He received numerous awards, including the Max Beckmann Prize, Frankfurt (2013), the UNESCO Joan Miro Medal (2003), and the Sculpture Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (1996).