Robert Mangold: A Survey 1981–2008
Pace Gallery, London
Through May 22, 2021
Pace Gallery presents an exhibition of Robert Mangold, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery in London. Robert Mangold: A Survey 1981–2008—the artist’s first solo show in the UK in 12 years—features significant paintings spanning three decades, tracing pictorial developments by one of the most significant artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Showcasing Robert Mangold’s lifelong balancing of shape, line, and color, the paintings on view epitomize the conceptual and aesthetic rigor of his six-decade career, while also demonstrating an enduring will to challenge definitions of painting. Spanning nearly 30 years of work, this survey of Robert Mangold’s mid-career allows viewers to identify themes as they develop, finding prescience in the earlier works. The exhibition has been greatly enhanced by the inclusion of several paintings from the private collection of the late Dr. Walter de Logi, a long-time collector and champion of Robert Mangold’s work.
In the 1960s Robert Mangold emerged as one of the most original and incisive voices shaping the discourse on painting in America. From the outset, Robert Mangold’s works explored the most elemental components of his art form, in doing so examining the very nature of painting. Integral to Robert Mangold’s thinking has always been a questioning of the primacy of the rectangular format. Beginning with the Walls and Areas of the mid-sixties, and right on through to today, Robert Mangold’s engagement with shaped canvases has allowed him to push his work beyond the conventions of traditional painting.
Bringing together vibrant but subtle color combinations, hand-drawn lines, and an innovative use of form, Robert Mangold’s ‘x’ or ‘+’ paintings, such as X Within X (Red-Orange) (1981) and Aqua/Green/Orange + Painting (1983), exist somewhere between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional; these works simultaneously insist on the ‘flatness’ of painting as well as its objecthood. Robert Mangold’s works always emphasize the relationship between the canvas and the wall and with the ‘x’ and ‘+’ paintings that relationship becomes even more apparent. These ideas are expanded in paintings such as Green Ellipse/Gray Frame (1989) in which Robert Mangold juxtaposes the active painted surface with the lines created by the unusual configuration of the diptych. Further, in Column Structure works of 2006, Robert Mangold continues to take a sculptural approach to his painting by joining multiple panels and tying them together with the elegant curl of a pencil line.
Joining panels to create expansive canvases recurs throughout Robert Mangold’s practice. Curved Plane/Figure VIII, Study (1995) and Red/White Zone Painting II (1996) are each made up of three panels with a curved top edge. In the latter, Robert Mangold paints over the canvas joins to create an incongruity between the painted image and the structure of the support. Robert Mangold further subverts expectations by drawing sweeping intersecting ellipses over the textured red panels. The ovals perfectly align but are separated by the painting’s central white panel. In this way, Robert Mangold explores ideas of perception and narrative by forcing the viewer to ‘complete’ the work by mentally connecting the lines.
In its evolution, Robert Mangold’s work never becomes predictably linear or dogmatic. Rather, it remains open to the surprising twists and turns of his intuition and curiosity, often referring to his earlier works and re-examining previously raised questions. Ring Image C (2008), with its turquoise surface and elegantly undulating lines, is yet a step further in Robert Mangold’s exploration of shaped canvases. Like his ‘x’ and ‘+’ paintings, Robert Mangold plays with positive and negative space: the painting itself surrounds the void inherent to the ring form, incorporating the wall into the work. For Robert Mangold, the Ring series is a way of ‘setting up problems for the viewer’, he is asking ‘how do you visually deal with a ring when what’s usually in the center of a painting is very important?’ In other words, Robert Mangold is interested in finding ways to confound expectations and in doing so encourages viewers to engage with his paintings in new ways.
ROBERT MANGOLD (b. 1937, North Tonawanda, New York) has, since the 1950s, explored line and colour on supports ranging in shape, size, and dimension. Committed to abstraction as a means of communication, he has worked within a consistent geometric vocabulary to produce a varied body of paintings and works on paper. His career has developed through an evolution of techniques for the application of paint onto his chosen surface—first plywood and Masonite, and later, beginning in 1968, stretched canvas. Moving away from the conventions of paintings, he introduced shaped canvases, working with symmetrical and asymmetrical forms as well as curvilinear edges. For his early shaped and multi-panel constructions, Robert Mangold airbrushed oil-based pigments in gradations of colour, and later used a roller before ultimately adopting a brush to apply acrylic in subtle hues that near transparency. He remained intrigued by colour as much as structure, and his relationship with it shifted throughout the decades. His initial palette, inspired by industrial objects—file cabinets, brick walls, and trucks—transitioned toward colours that evoke mood: warm ochres, light blues, deep oranges, olive greens, and other hues. Robert Mangold’s mostly monochromatic compositions show an attention to gesture with the addition of hand-drawn pencil lines that curve across the planes of colour.
Robert Mangold’s European exhibitions include Robert Mangold: Paintings 1964–1982, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, October 21–December 12, 1982 and Robert Mangold: Paintings: 1964–1987, at the Hallen für neue Kunst, Schaffhausen, Switzerland, May 2–October 31, 1987. These shows were followed by the retrospective Robert Mangold: Painting as Wall, Werke von 1964 bis 1993, presented at Hallen für neue Kunst, Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in 1993, before travelling to RENN Espace d’Art Contemporain, Paris, November 27, 1993–June 26, 1994; Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Muenster, February 12–April 12, 1995; andCulturgest C.G.D., Lisbon, Portugal, September 15–October 22, 1995. Additionally, Robert Mangold: Paintings and Drawings 1984–1997 was presented at Museum Wiesbaden, October 18, 1998–February 21, 1999, travelling to Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen, Switzerland, June 16–August 22, 1999. More recently, Robert Mangold/Gaugin was presented at Musée d’Orsay, Paris, May 30–September 3, 2006 and Robert Mangold X, Plus and Frame Paintings was presented at Parasol Unit, London, UK, February 24–May 8, 2009.
PACE GALLERY
6 Burlington Gardens, London W1S 3ET
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