The Düsseldorf artists' group ZERO, led by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack and later joined by Günther Uecker, attracted attention from the end of the 1950s. They were the revolutionaries of the Rhineland art scene. ZERO was supposed to be a new beginning - a conscious break with convention. They developed a new art with new design principles and aesthetic ideas, in which light and movement dominated.
The same spirit of optimism prevailed in the Milanese art scene. Here, as in Düsseldorf, forms of self-organisation developed that served the purpose of close networking: In Düsseldorf there were the evening exhibitions in Otto Piene's studio and the accompanying ZERO publications; in Milan it was the gallery and the magazine Azimut(h). Fontana, a generation older, was the established figure in this German-Italian network of young artists. His theory of a completely new kind of art, realised in works of great simplicity and directness that were nevertheless perceived as provocative, confirmed their own thinking. Not only Fontana's reduction to the gesture, but also his reduction of colour corresponded to what Mack and Piene were already writing about colour, light and movement in the late 1950s.
The room brings together works by contemporaries who either received Fontana's art directly or worked in parallel with similar artistic means. Heinz Mack, for example, is concerned with making visible light, structure and movement, which were also central elements in Fontana's art. The 1959 relief emphasises the reflections of light on its shiny and reflective surface. The vertical, protruding rows of dots are divided into intervals that become less dense and less frequent towards the lower edge of the picture. The embossing on the metal foil interacts with the light to create a dynamic rhythm, particularly through the movement of the viewer in space. Otto Piene's work 'Lichtweißkreis' comes from a series of halftone paintings in which oil paint was pressed through a perforated cardboard screen and then poured over with turpentine. When the paint was washed off, the halftone dots became visible in the light as small glowing dots.
