In the late 1950s, at a time of profound renewal, young artists in Düsseldorf were looking for a new beginning. After the war and during the reconstruction years, they sought to rethink art in a new and positive way, beyond pathos, pictorial gesture and the weight of history.
They called their movement ZERO: the zero point from which everything seemed possible again, and at the same time the countdown word that launches the rocket into space, into the unknown. ZERO was not a fixed group, but an open network that quickly connected with international avant-garde artists, including Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Yayoi Kusama, Nanda Vigo and many others.
For a long time, no exhibition devoted to this formative period had been mounted in southern Germany, a period that regained new attention about a decade ago through major retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and Gropius Bau in Berlin.
This exhibition features works by selected ZERO artists, including Nanda Vigo.