Heinz Mack: Art Experience

Dazzling light objects and vibrant canvases: Heinz Mack, co-founder of the ZERO movement and two-time documenta participant, is one of the foremost international artists of our time. Three of Mack’s aluminium objects from the 1960s and 1970s are coming to Dorotheum’s Post-War and Contemporary Art auction in May 2024, together with his Red Painting from 2005.

“Although it may seem that my work is exclusively concerned with light, I have to clarify that my sole intention has always been, and still is, to create objects whose appearance is immaterial; to this end, I mostly use other things – light and movement”, the painter and sculptor Heinz Mack explains his practice.

Whereas the Impressionists sought to capture light at the place where it is made visible, specifically when it strikes a particular object, and the Pointellists shifted the appearance of light to the viewer’s eye by breaking it down to its spectral colours, Heinz Mack took a different tack in the mid-1950s. He began to develop objects onto which light could settle directly. The ZERO years from 1957 to 1963 marked a pivotal point in his artistic development. It was during this period that he initially eschewed painting in colour, concentrating instead exclusively on monochromatic pictures guided by concepts of pattern or structure. It was also during those years that he developed his now famous Light Reliefs, Rotations and Dynamos – works in polished, raw or corrugated metal, plexiglas or mirrored glass. These objects, with varying basic geometric shapes, absorb, reflect, and pulsate with the colours of their surroundings, fundamentally changing the concept of sculpture. It was also around this time that Mack began to create installations in pristine natural spaces – the shimmering dunes of the Sahara, the frozen expanses of the Arctic – in search of infinite verticals and horizontals. Modulation of these metallic structures was constantly in flux: their visual nature, but also their integration into the surroundings through the refraction of light and movement of the viewer around them, made them partners in the flow, randomness, and chaos of life. The same can be said of the 1960s and 70s sculptures included in the Dorotheum sale: Terra Digitalis, Wasserwolke Olympia (Watercloud Olympia) and Das Meer (The Sea). In their diverse forms, they establish an open space that invites subjective contemplation and both encourages and demands interpretation, true to the maxim that “art is an experience to be had”.

The symbiosis of structure and movement finds new expression in Mack’s 2005 Red Painting, part of an ongoing body of work titled Chromatische Konstellationen (Chromatic Constellations). After a period of almost three decades in which he painted relatively little, Mack discovered a new kind of colour panel painting in the early 1990s. Developing it further, he transitioned from monochrome to a formal approach inspired by Goethe’s colour wheel, resulting in vibrant, colourful paintings with a pronounced orphic quality. Red Painting exemplifies Mack’s subtle, seamless gradation of hues without losing a major distinguishing feature: the ability to show clear contrasts from one shade of colour to the next. The border zone where two colours meet becomes an oscillating plane within an imaginary pictorial space. Mack’s colours ultimately reveal themselves as qualities of light, manifested in vibrant refractions. The brushwork is translucent and dynamic, and as in the three-dimensional works mentioned above, we now see the rhythmic succession of shades, themselves causing the air in front of the canvases to shimmer, generating their own energy field.