Oil on canvas
Signed and dated on verso. Titled on stretcher. 109,5 x 129 cm (43,1 x 50,7 in)

PROVENANCE: Adler & Conkright Fine Art, New York (with two adhesive labels on verso of cover panel).
Haunch of Venison, New York (with adhesive labels on verso of cover panel).
Private collection southern Germany.

EXHIBITION: Der unverbrauchte Blick. Kunst unserer Zeit in Berliner Sicht. Eine Ausstellung aus Privatsammlungen in Berlin, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin 1987.

Heinz Mack, born in Lollar in Hesse on 8 March 1931, studied painting at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf from 1950 to 1953 and graduated with a state examination for teachers. At the same time he studied philosophy in Cologne. Together with Otto Piene Heinz Mack founded the avant-garde artist group ZERO, to which his name has been intrinsically tied ever since. Instead of ‘Classical Compositions' it confronted the viewer with totally new and provocative aspects: Light, movement, space, time, dynamics, vibration and serial structures come to the fore. Light and movement were also in the focus of the new pieces of art like the ‘Sahara-Project, which Mack designed in 1958 and partly realized in 1968/69.

This work is part of the series of works called “Dynamische Strukturen“ (Dynamic Structures), which make for a interstage between painting and kinetics. In making this kind of Art, Mack attempted to sidestep the formlessness of Tachism and to avoid classic principles of composition at the same time. The broad horizontal zones are ruptured by a number of small vertical structure elements, and thus create a kind of motion on the image. These vibrating rhythm curves, which strongly resemble a cardiogram, are subject to the principle of coincidence. In order to underline the structural predominance, the range of colors is constricted to black and white, which is so characteristic of Zero works such as this one. “I add vibration to the colors, I give them structure, or: I lend them their form. (Translation of quote from Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst. Anette Kuhn: Heinz Mack, p. 6).

In 1964 he designed the 'Licht-Raum' together with Piene and Uecker for the documenta 3, which can today be seen at the Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf. Apart from the ‘Rotoren', the ‘Lichtreliefs' were a second independent work group, which came to the fore mainly during the 1970s – after the ZERO movement had been dissolved. During the 1980s Mack received numerous orders for the design of public spaces. He finished the Jürgen-Ponto-Platz in Frankfurt in 1981, erected the ‘Columne pro caelo' in front of the cathedral in Cologne in 1984 and Mack also planned the design of the ‘Platz der Deutschen Einheit’ in Düsseldorf in 1989. Inspired by the colors of the sun in his studio on Ibiza, Mack resumed painting in 1991 and called his works ’Chromatische Konstellationen'. Heinz Mack is regarded an untiring experimenter with the spectrum of colored light. As a painter, drawer, sculptor, ceramic artist, but also as a designer of squares and interiors, he always puts the aesthetic laws of light and color, structure and form in new questions. [SM].