很少有人会想到与死亡为伴。而就在本周四，著名德国艺术家奥托·皮纳（Otto Piene）在德意志银行美术馆（Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle）和柏林新国家美术馆（Neue Nationalgalerie）同时举办的个展开幕式后，在回家的出租车中又返回了人生的“零”点，享年86岁。

“零族”是由奥托·皮纳和海因茨·马克（Heinz Mack）创立于1958年的艺术团体，可以被视为德国艺术家们对卢西奥·冯塔那（Lucio Fontana）、伊夫·克莱因（Yves Klein）和皮耶罗·曼佐尼（Piero Manzoni）等人的艺术的回应。

“零族”宣言中提出“零是沉默，亦是开始”，这一“零点时刻”标志着二战恐怖之后一个全新的开始，它是抽象、是光亮，是能量。创立之后，“零族”迅速壮大，吸引了四五十位艺术家，他们的创作让德国观众感受到了幸福的未来。苏联发射了人类第一颗人造卫星，人类的抱负似乎失去了界限。当时的奥托·皮纳一定也是踌躇满志，在过去的20年里，奥托·皮纳的作品在德国各大美术馆都炙手可热。而柏林墙的倒塌也让“零族”艺术家们受到了冷落——一个新的时代即将来临！因此，25年来，“零族”及奥托·皮纳本人的作品中也出现了一丝沧海桑田的感慨，所以柏林的这次展览也正好像是这位曾经的弄潮儿气势恢宏的曲终谢幕。

“Zero is silence. Zero is the beginning…” was the artists’ attempt on a “Stunde Null” (Zero hour), a complete new beginning after the terrors of the Second World War. It was abstraction, it was light, it was pure energy. The movement that quickly grew to some forty or fifty artists transported German audiences into a blissful notion of the future. The USSR had just launched the Sputnik and the sky was the limit. Otto Piene certainly was reaching for it and for at least two decades his work was front and center in almost every museum in Germany. Ironically it was the fall of the Berlin wall that pushed aside the Zero artists, as a new future was about to start. So during the past twenty-five years or so, a strange sentimentality about a future-past began engulfing the artworks of Zero and also those of Otto Piene. In Berlin one can witness the grand finale of an energetic artist whose work now is history.