Together with Heinz Mack, Otto Piene was a founding member of the artist group ZERO. He was noted particularly for his fire and smoke paintings as well as his light-kinetic works, especially the 'Lichtballett'. Piene's consistent, almost scientific analysis of the topics of light, movement and space was also at the core of his technically quite different fire paintings. In 1972, he was appointed professor of visual design for environmental art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
