Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Günther Uecker, Zero’s founding trio

For the first time in Australia, some of the key international figures of the movement will be shown together at Mona. You will pass through a series of chambers, each an immersive exploration of an important aspect of the Zero phenomenon: vibration. Artists such as Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, Yayoi Kusama, Nanda Vigo, Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp and Lucio Fontana exploit the effects of reflection, saturation, grade, density, and distortion to produce a sense of movement in the viewer.

The original group disbanded in 1966, marking the occasion with a party. Heinz Mack wrote that he found the ending ‘quite as liberating’ as the beginning. But was this intensely creative moment in art history really concluded so decisively? Perhaps ZERO is better thought of less as an art-historical epoch than as a timeless ‘way of seeing’. Either way, it was part of an opening up, over the course of the twentieth century, of traditional ideas about what art could be.

These artists dreamed of an exhibition on the moon. Perhaps Tassie is as close (or far) as they are going to get.

Exhibition concept by Tijs Visser

9 June 2018–22 April 2019