Given the nihilist mood in German art after the war, it was only a matter of time before one group trumped all the others and called itself "Zero". The moment came in 1957, courtesy of a pair of young Düsseldorf artists, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, who had studied together at the city's famous Kunstakademie. Piene, who has died in Berlin at the age of 86, would become the best known of Zero's creators. (Mack and another leading member, Günther Uecker, are still alive.) He was also the one who explained the group's choice of name. Zero, he said, was the last number in the countdown before a rocket takes off.
This was probably the most coherent explanation the movement ever gave of itself, otherwise living up to its reductivist handle by producing no formal manifesto or written philosophy. That did not check its rapid ascent. The group's dogged refusal to lay down laws soon found it friends in postwar Germany, then in the rest of Europe and Japan and, after a show in Washington in 1964, in the US.
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