Almine Rech Celebrates Adding Heinz Mack to the Roster with Career Retrospective

Heinz Mack b. 1931, Germany Follow +

Paris-founded gallery Almine Rech will celebrate its newest artist, Heinz Mack, with a retrospective spanning six decades of his exploration of light and space.

At 94, Mack—co-founder of the postwar ZERO movement, defined by its embrace of monochrome, light, and motion—will present works from across his career at the gallery’s New York outpost from 9 May to 14 June 2025. Gallery owner Almine Rech has spoken of her affinity for the movement’s ethos, describing ZERO as a “new beginning” in the wake of the devastation of the Second World War.

Among Mack’s most iconic bodies of work is the ‘Sahara Project’ (initiated in 1959, with subsequent iterations), in which he installed reflective sculptures in the Tunisian desert to pursue what he described as “pure light” in an unmediated landscape. These works extend ZERO’s principles into the terrain of Land art, staging a dialogue between environment, luminosity, and object.

Mack founded ZERO with Otto Piene in Düsseldorf in 1957; Günther Uecker joined shortly thereafter. The group sought to redefine art in the aftermath of World War II, turning away from gestural expressionism in favour of light, space, seriality, and movement. ZERO soon developed into an international network that included artists such as Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni.

“Whatever we had learned, we decided to forget… This came with a deep and almost unconscious desire to start from the real beginning,” Mack said in 2014.

In 2014, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s, a major survey that travelled to Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul. —[O]

Main image: Heinz Mack with Untitled (Chromatic Constellation) (2013). Acrylic on canvas. 291 x 315 cm. © Heinz Mack. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech. Photo: Archive Studio Mack.