Otto Piene was born in Bad Laasphe, not far from Siegen, in 1928. He first studied art in Munich and then in Düsseldorf in the 1950s. At the same time, he was studying philosophy at the University of Cologne. In 1958, he founded the ZERO movement in Düsseldorf together with various other artists. From the end of the 1960s, he taught at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), where he developed Sky Art. He spent most of his life in the USA. Piene’s endeavours to make art accessible to a wide audience were groundbreaking, even then, and are still exemplary today.