HEINZ MACK

Throughout his trajectory, Heinz Mack has continuously carved a pioneering artistic production marked by investigations on light, colour, temporality and movement. Mack began his career in the 1950s, famously founding the Group ZERO (1957–1966) alongside Otto Piene in 1957, later also joining forces with Gunther Uecker in 1961, with the aim of creating a space devoid of pre-existing structures—a place of silence—for new possibilities and beginnings to emerge. Mack was also in close contact with artist Yves Klein, with whom he developed a great friendship and collaborated on numerous occasions, and who introduced him to Jean Tinguely, discovering a universe of experimentations that informed his own search for aesthetic purity, striving for an essential, unmediated work.

Mack notably wrote, ‘The goal is to achieve pure, grand, objective clarity, free of romantic, arbitrarily individual expression. In my work I explore and strive for structural phenomena, whose strict logic I interrupt or expand by means of aleatoric interventions, that is, chance events.’

In line with this, Mack’s practice has come to rest on three main pillars—light, movement and colour—, which he has explored through a varied production that ranges from kinetic sculptures, metal or mirror steles, to Land Art, while also including paintings characterised by chromatic modulations. The exhibition proposes a selection of works from different fundamental stages of the artist’s investigations, including his kinetic production with early non-mechanical sculptures made of carved metal that elicit movement through the reflection of natural variations in light, as well as his iconic Rotors, which mechanically engender light refractions that shimmer and transform through almost imperceptible movement, occasionally amplified by built-in artificial light. In addition, the selection presents Mack’s emblematic Steles, or columns, which manipulate light in relation to space, mirroring, altering, and integrating its surroundings into its surfaces, while also offering an overview of the artist’s engagement with painting, which is anchored in the alternation of chromatic modulations, executed as a means of achieving what he defines as colour vibration. The varied and meticulous selection of works presented in Paragold, will enable the audience to delve into a retrospective cutout of Heinz Mack’s oeuvre, with punctuations from specific phases in his career, that illustrate the foundation of his practice.

Ultimately, the exhibition foregrounds the seminal nature of the artist’s long-standing, and groundbreaking practice, through a selection of works that converge on the artist’s guiding interest for the matters of light, movement and colour. The presentation demonstrates how Mack has worked to understand these elements, and subsequently enhance them in relation to each other, in an intransigent pursuit for what he understands as aesthetic clarity.

Throughout his career, Heinz Mack (Lollar, Germany, 1931) has continuously carved a pioneering artistic production marked by investigations on light, temporality and movement, which have taken the form of major installations, as well as sculptures, paintings and works on paper. Mack began his career in the 1950s, famously founding the Group ZERO (1957–1966) alongside Otto Piene in 1957, later also joining forces with Gunther Uecker in 1961, with the aim of creating a space devoid of pre-existing structures for new possibilities and beginnings to emerge. Mack was also in close contact with artist Yves Klein, with whom he developed a great friendship and collaborated on numerous occasions, and who introduced him to Jean Tinguely, discovering a universe of experimentations that informed his own search for aesthetic purity, striving for an essential, unmediated work. Since the beginning of his career, Heinz Mack has continuously participated in major international exhibitions including Documenta II (1959) and Documenta III (1966) in Kassel, later also representing the Federal Republic of Germany at the 35^th Venice Biennale (1970). Mack has been also been honoured with major awards, including the Premio Marzotto (1963), the 1^st Prix Arts Plastiques at the 4^th Paris Biennale (1965) and the Grand Federal Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany (2011).