Dutch Nul group
On 1 April 1961, a stone's throw from the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, Galerie 201 organized the ‘Internationale tentoonstelling van NIETS’ ('International Exhibition of NOTHING’).
[1] ‘We need art like we need a hole in the head,’ the pamphlet 'Einde' states; ‘From now on the undersigned pledge to work to disband art circles and close down exhibition facilities, which can then finally be put to worthier use.’ [2] The 'Einde' pamphlet imagines a new beginning, as Armando and Henk Peeters had already proclaimed in texts written several years earlier for the Dutch Informals.
The group replaced the expression of emotions in paint with an attempt at an absence of 'personal signature', resulting in colourless and monochrome works virtually devoid of form or composition.
Fontana's escape ‘from the prison of the flat surface’ by piercing or slicing up the canvas and Burri's material, burnt plastic, made a big impression on him.
[5] Burri and Fontana played a vital role in the transition from paint on canvas or panel to the use of industrial materials and the abandonment of the flat surface.
[6] Henderikse also turned his back on painting in 1959, with assemblages of everyday objects, and toward 1960 Schoonhoven strived, in frozen, increasingly whiter reliefs, ‘by avoiding intentional form .
[8] The first issue of the new group's internationally oriented ‘house organ’, the journal Revue nul = 0, edited by Armando, Henk Peeters and Herman de Vries, came out in November 1961.
Nul was a search for new relationships between art and reality, with at its base the rejection of uniqueness, authenticity and decorative attractiveness in the traditional sense of the word.
The group reduced the multi-coloured to the monochrome and opted for repetition, seriality and the directness of everyday materials and objects, in use and effect.
‘The personal element lies in the idea and no longer in the manufacture.’[12] The identity of the Dutch Nul group navigated between a cheerful orientation toward the world of the everyday and the cool sobriety of the serial monochrome.
to let go of the work and to become the spectator of a self-directed performance.’[13] In terms of form, Peeters's tactile cotton balls, whether on a canvas or on a wall as a three-dimensional installation, are balanced on the cusp between Nul and the German Zero.
Jan Schoonhoven’s ‘objectively neutral expression of the generally applicable’ persisted throughout Nul, and in his work, monochrome – the reduction of all colour to white – was the chosen instrument.
Armando saw a straight line from his monochrome oil paintings of the late 1950s to his assemblages of bolts and barbed wire during the Nul period.
It’s always been that way.’[16] Archetypal Nul work seems constructed out of a multiplication of uniform and isolated forms, objects or phenomena: as repetitions of steel bolts, of matchboxes, of identical white surfaces grids of burn holes and cotton balls.
These are examples of radical adaptations of reality, like Armando’s 1964 installation of oil drums at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in The Hague.
To undermine the retinal aspect of art, the precious and status-based object as a fetish for the eye, Peeters envisaged one more method: to bypass ‘seeing’ altogether and appeal to the sense of touch.
In 2014 and 2015, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum organized the exhibition 'ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s' (October 2014-January 2015), paying tribute to the international ZERO movement and its artists.
