of the artificial in and of itself.’ These are works that, according to Schoonhoven, offer the possibility ‘to arrive at [an] objectively neutral expression of the generally applicable.’ The International Context Armando, Jan Henderikse, Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven first exhibited their new, non-painting work at the ‘Internationale Malerei 1960-61’ exhibition in Wolframs-Eschenbach, Germany. 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. With contributions by artists who a year later would take part in the first Nul exhibition at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, the journal presented a good overview of the main themes of the international ZERO movement, which emerged around the journal ZERO, published in 1958 and 1961 by German artists Heinz Mack en Otto Piene. The movement found sympathizers in countries like Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Venezuela. Since the late 1950s the Dutchmen had established close ties with the German Zero group led by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene (Günther Uecker joined the group in 1961) and the Japanese group Gutai, as well as with Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, the French Nouveau Réaliste Yves Klein and Japan's Yayoi Kusama. The Identity of Nul Nul's pragmatism, its sober approach to the world, to the product of art, to being an artist and to reality, is expressed in the formal characteristics of its works, but also in its everyday practice, in the way works were created and exhibited, the way artists operated and presented themselves. The Nul artists aimed to shed the stereotyped image of the bohemian in a painting smock and had a fresh attitude toward the consumer society, quite at odds with the artistic scene of the early 1960s. 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. Even its conceptual aspect, the splitting of thought and action, of conception, production as well as the possibility of repeat production was, in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp, linked to a different interpretation of ideas like craftsmanship and expertise. At the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum in 1962,