Edited by Marc Callewaert, this catalogue documents the landmark group exhibition Motion in Vision, held at the Hessenhuis in Antwerp in 1959. Associated with the ZERO movement and its international counterparts – including the Nul group in the Netherlands, the Nouveaux Réalistes in France, Azimuth in Italy, and the Gutai group in Japan – the exhibition featured works by Robert Breer, Pol Bury, Yves Klein, Heinz Mack, Enzo Mari, Bruno Munari, Günther Uecker (whose name appears as “Necker” on the cover), Otto Piene, Dieter Roth, Jesús Rafael Soto, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Paul Van Hoeydonck.

In his curatorial statement, Marc Callewaert emphasizes the centrality of movement within the visual arts and advocates embracing science and new media as essential forces in artistic work:

“Throughout the ages, the artist has sought to make perceptible what Henri Michaux calls ‘the inner movements for which there exist no limbs’. From the grandiloquent, pathos-driven gestures of Baroque art, through trompe-l'œil and Futurist illusionism, there has been but one and the same concern to go beyond, the same need to break the static order, to ‘displace the lines’. The advent of cinema, while demonstrating henceforth the arbitrariness of any clear demarcation between technical discovery and artistic creation, came to prove that all real movement implies duration, and that duration presupposes space. If the artist does not wish to endanger either the vital rhythm or the very integrity of the work, it is these two dimensions – duration and space – that the artist will strive to conquer. Quite naturally, he will thus be led to create new media. And we shall witness, with the research of spatio-dynamism, a great questioning of the plastic language. Responding to the scientific propositions of his time while transcending them, the artist affirms his central position and his spiritual function. Less than ever can he live on the margins of his era. For him, more than for anyone, science is a terrain of inspiration, the machine a friend. Recalling Moholy-Nagy’s wish for ‘a broader, more general view of the inter-relatedness of art and life,’ his works tend toward a new unity and a new poetry: one in which not only the emotional content of a century may express itself through its mechanical conquests, but where sensibility will awaken to the beauty, the magic, and the very message of these conquests. May this international gathering, assembled for the first time in Antwerp, at the Hessenhuis, reveal some of the infinite possibilities that remain to be explored in this field.” (loosely translated from the French.)

Kinetic art is incorporated into the catalogue itself through unique contributions (mostly cut-outs and fold-out texts) by Mack, Piene, Roth, Bury, Tinguely, and guest artist Emmett Williams. The exhibition and catalogue represent seminal documents in the international dissemination of their work, presenting their artistic research to an international audience for the first time.