In Hey, Max, Otto Piene harnesses the power of fire to manipulate his materials. From a scorched encrustation of pigment, a vortex of delicate veils billows out, a haze of subtle half-tones out shifting smokily over the board. Otherworldly yet eerily familiar, this ethereal effect traverses the composition with alchemical power, transforming from black to deep crimson before dissolving away to reveal the white ground. In commanding the obliterating force of fire to create art, Piene succeeded in his search for a way to encompass the power of the universe within his work. ‘One glance at the sky, at the sun, at the sea is enough to show that the world outside man is bigger than that inside him,’ he wrote, ‘that it is so immense that man needs a medium to transform the power of the sun into an illumination that is suitable to him, into a stream whose waves are like the beating of his heart’ (O. Piene, quoted in ZERO, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2015, p. 434). An iconic motif in Piene’s practice, other fire paintings are held in international museum collections, such as Ohne Titel, 1962, in the collection of the State Museums of Berlin, and Venus von Willendorf, 1963, in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Piene was drafted into the German army in 1943 at the age of fifteen, and was posted to watch the night skies, searching for the tiny pinpricks of light which would signal the approaching enemy. This experience had a lasting impact on the artist, who described his art as a means of dispelling darkness: ‘I go to darkness itself, I pierce it with light, I make it transparent, I take its terror from it, I turn it into a volume of power with the breath of life like my own body, and I take smoke so that it can fly’ (O. Piene, quoted in ZERO, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2015, p. 434). After the war, Europe was left in a state of trauma, and artists like Piene searched for techniques and methods that would rejuvenate the avant-garde. Piene became a founding member of the Zero group, seeking, together with Heinz Mack, Günther Uecker, and the artists of their wider international collective, the purity of a new beginning in art. In the ritual impulse of Hey, Max, Piene brings creation from destruction like a phoenix, his magnificent display of texture and colour smouldering with the cosmic potentials of a world created anew.