The man who added poetry to our skies

Not sure if you’ve already read my article about Le Radeau des Cimes, but I think I have a bit of an obsession with inflatable forms floating in the air.

I remember falling on this visual one day, I was instantly mesmerized by its beauty, then I looked into it.

The star you see in nature is Berlin Star (1984), one of the emblematic works of Otto Piene’s Sky Art. Piene was a German artist, born in 1928 and died in Berlin in 2014. 

He co-founded “ZERO,” a group internationally open to artists seeking a new artistic renewal and embarking on the adventurous pursuit of giving form to universality.

“The sky is the greatest museum one could imagine.” Otto Piene Otto Piene is best known for his kinetic works, luminous sculptures, and monumental sky installations, what he called Sky Art. 

His work aimed to create dialogue between art, nature, and technology, with a deeply utopian and spiritual approach. He saw the sky not as a boundary, but as an infinite space for artistic expression.

Olympic Rainbow by Otto Piene, during Munich Olympic Games

Back to Berlin Star, this approximately 15-meter high star was installed notably in the Californian desert during the Desert Sun / Desert Moon event in 1986. This monumental inflatable sculpture stretched across the landscape like a celestial body fallen from the sky.

A giant star in which artist Charlotte Moorman performed, the same artist who a few years earlier in Sky Kiss (1982) joined Piene in another living artwork. I leave you with the striking video that shows Charlotte being lifted into the air by an impressive number of helium balloons. It reminds me a bit of Harry Potter’s Aunt Marjorie Dursley inflating at dinner and floating away in the sky.

Earlier I mentioned the term Sky Art, which today is known and recognized. It’s important to know that even though Otto Piene wasn’t the very first to make works float in the air, he was the one who gave this practice a fully-fledged artistic identity. 

From the 1960s, he invented the term Sky Art and imagined a new form of public art : aerial, ephemeral, accessible transforming the sky into a true exhibition space.

To stay on the same theme, I’d like to introduce another Otto Piene piece that caught my attention : Olympic Rainbow, deployed in Munich during the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games. 

It saw floating tubes in the colors of the Olympic rings forming a giant arc suspended in the sky. A work of peace and unity through color and movement.

Through Sky Art and projects like Lone Pine, Olympic Rainbow, and Sky Kiss, Otto Piene offers another idea of creation : art of the world, more than just art of the object.

“The sky is the greatest museum one could imagine.” Otto Piene