Robert Mangold: Pentagons and Folded Space @ Pace, New York - Part of Pace 65th anniversary year Exhibitions

Robert Mangold

Pentagons and Folded Space

Pace Gallery, New York

May 9 – August 15, 2025 

Pace presents a new body of work by Robert Mangold at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This exhibition—Pace’s fifteenth presentation dedicated to a new body of work by Mangold since 1991—spans the gallery’s second and seventh floors. It features paintings, including three multi-panel works, and works on paper created by the artist between 2022 and 2024.

This show is organized on the occasion of Pace’s 65th anniversary year, during which the gallery is mounting exhibitions of work by major 20th century artists—with whom it has maintained decades-long relationships—at its spaces around the world. It is accompanied by a new catalogue, with an essay by Dieter Schwarz, from Pace Publishing, which has produced 16 books on each new body of Mangold’s work since his first exhibition with the gallery in 1992.

Mangold has been a key figure in painting since the 1960s. Exploring the fundamental elements of composition, he has created boundary-pushing geometric abstractions on shaped canvases that charted new frontiers within the medium. Robert Mangold is part of a legacy forged with other major figures of Conceptualism and Minimalism, including his close friends Sol LeWitt and Robert Ryman and his wife Sylvia Plimack Mangold.

The body of work that the artist will present in his upcoming exhibition features broad planes of color across canvases of diverse shapes and sizes, reflecting a continuing engagement with shape, line, and color—and the effect these elements can have on each other—that has defined his practice for over 60 years. As with his preceding series, Mangold’s new and recent works are part of a continuous evolution, elaborating upon the paintings and drawings he showed at Pace in New York in 2022 while also reaching back to his earliest experimentations with color and form, symmetry and asymmetry, and notions of wholeness and fragmentation. Several loans from private and public collections will figure in the exhibition, including Four Pentagons (2022). This four-panel painting, loaned by the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of the largest works that Robert Mangold has produced in decades.

The multi-panel and individual canvases in the show speak to the artist’s enduring interest in the ways that line, color, and shape can give a painting a sense of extending into multiple dimensional planes. Meanwhile, the works on paper in this exhibition, all made in 2024, shed light on a crucial aspect of Mangold’s practice, offering a more intimate experience of his abstractions.

Throughout 2025, Pace is celebrating its anniversary year with 16 exhibitions of work by artists who have been central to its program for decades. Presented around the world, these exhibitions are odes to some of the gallery's longest-lasting relationships. Over the course of their careers, these figures, with Pace's support, charted new courses in the history of art. These special exhibitions are listed chronologically below:

Joel Shapiro — Tokyo, January

Louise Nevelson — New York, January; Seoul, April

Kenneth Noland — Seoul, January; Tokyo, March

Sam Gilliam — Seoul, January; Tokyo, March

Jean Dubuffet — New York, March; Berlin, May

Robert Indiana — Hong Kong, March; 

Robert Indiana: The American Dream  —New York, May

Robert Irwin — Los Angeles, April

Robert Mangold — New York, May

James Turrell — Seoul, June

Claes Oldenburg — Tokyo, July

Agnes Martin — New York, November

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Robert Mangold @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - Paintings and Works on Paper 1989-2022 Exhibition

Robert Mangold 

Paintings and Works on Paper 1989-2022 

Pace Gallery, Seoul 

January 20 – March 11, 2023 

Robert Mangold 

Attic Series V, 1990 

© Robert Mangold 

Pace presents a survey exhibition of work by Robert Mangold—who for over six decades has investigated the possibilities of shape, line, and color as they relate to painting—at its recently expanded arts complex in Seoul. Robert Mangold: Paintings and Works on Paper 1989–2022, the artist’s first solo show in South Korea in nearly 30 years, features paintings created by the artist between the late 1980s and the present day as well as a selection of his works on paper. 

Robert Mangold has been a key figure in painting since the 1960s. Exploring the fundamental elements of composition, the artist has created boundary-pushing geometric abstractions on shaped canvases that charted new frontiers within the medium. He is part of a legacy forged with other major figures of Conceptualism and Minimalism, including his close friends Sol LeWitt and Robert Ryman and his wife Sylvia Plimack Mangold.

Included in the exhibition are the paintings Attic Series V (1990) and Red/White Zone Painting II (1996), which serve as shapeshifting structures in their own rights, reflecting the artist’s sustained and ever evolving explorations of color, line, and shape as well as his deep interest in enactments of balance and asymmetry, wholeness and fragmentation. His new painting Plane Structure 9 (2022) notably lacks a drawn element—since 2018, the artist has experimented with works free of drawing, breaking from his longstanding practice of incorporating line into his canvases.

While Robert Mangold’s paintings and drawings are rarely exhibited together, Pace’s exhibition in Seoul presents these works engaged in lively exchanges. The mingling of these mediums in the show sheds light on a crucial aspect of Mangold’s process-based, contemplative practice through which he uses drawing to parse his vision for a painting. The artist wrote in 1988 that his works on paper “are where the ideas are worked out and most of the important decisions are made, the momentum from them carry me into the painting.”

ROBERT MANGOLD (b. 1937, North Tonawanda, New York) has, since the 1950s, explored line and color 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, Mangold airbrushed oil-based pigments in gradations of color, and later used a roller before ultimately adopting a brush to apply acrylic in subtle hues that near transparency. He remained intrigued by color 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 colors that evoke mood: warm ochres, light blues, deep oranges, olive greens, and other hues. Mangold’s mostly monochromatic compositions show an attention to gesture with the addition of hand-drawn pencil lines that curve across the planes of color.

PACE SEOUL

2/3F, 267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Robert Mangold @ Pace Gallery, London - A Survey 1981–2008

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

www.pacegallery.com

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