The Brooklyn Rail

After studying art and philosophy together in Düsseldorf, Otto Piene and Heinz Mack founded artist collective ZERO and rejected the gestural subjectivism of both Tachisme, and Art Informel, the then prevalent movements of painting in post-war Europe. ZERO—the name intended to recall the countdown to a rocket launch—raised associations with a new beginning as well as the fear of ballistic missiles and nuclear attacks. Piene and Mack were joined in their collective by Günther Uecker in 1961. After the destruction caused by the war, these artists decided art would have to find new ways to connect to or reflect reality. When Lucio Fontana returned to Italy from Argentina after the war with Manifiesto Blanco, in which he demanded new forms and techniques, saying “We are continuing the evolution of art,” the ZERO artists established comparable demands and looked to Kinetic art, emphasizing light and motion. They also reduced the emphasis on the artist to prioritize the viewers’ participation. Mack 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.”

Mack’s exploration of material includes the use of both traditional and unconventional means. Like Fontana, or Yves Klein—another artist he knew well—Mack expanded possibilities for both painting and sculpture. Here, in this current exhibition, the emphasis is on painting, where Mack’s use of color, light, and material results in innovative and beautiful works. Several sculptures are included; for example Nemesis (2014), a stainless steel and anodized aluminum stele stands over twelve feet tall, its reflective surface and repeated form, rhythmically resisting stasis.

Vibration and movement are typically present in Mack’s works. The appearance and play of fleeting light on reflective surfaces can be literal as in Vibration (1959), made using hand embossed aluminum on masonite board. Or it can be implied with composed gradients of brushed and colored resin within vertical and narrow sections that end in diagonals, indexical of movement and consequently temporality, as in the early Vibration of the Shadows (1959) made this time with synthetic resin on nettle fabric. The tonal shifts and disjunction between shapes ensure in both of these an optically shifting array. Light = Black (Chromatic Constellation) (2023), a more recent work in acrylic on canvas, indicates the consistency of Mack’s continual explorations. Two horizontal bands, tonally graduated from light to dark colors—blacks, greys, a narrow white band, empty, along the top edge from one side to the other—shimmer with short and quick brush marks. The work invokes and embodies temporality by its haptically animate surface. Henri Matisse comes to mind because of his remarks not only about black as a source of light, but also black as the ground zero of his own innovations with color.

Again horizontal, encouraging a lateral visual scanning, Large Star-Spectrum (Chromatic Constellation) (2004) in which a chromatic range pulses light in passage laterally not only because of the horizontal orientation of the painting itself, but also vertically to reconfigure permutations of roughly rectangular chroma and luminosity. Untitled (Chromatic Constellation) (2013) is also acrylic on canvas and maps pictorial depth with lines of different color that appear to ricochet from edge to edge, the with darker colors of various blues and black appearing deeper in pictorial space. This painting and several here recall the works of Italian painter Piero Dorazio who shared Mack’s commitment to abstraction and particularly to the use of color and light in spatial pictorial movement.

The effects of light—a changing presence, across surface, in material or from—contrast in color reappear through the years of Mack’s oeuvre. In fact, Mack described his life’s work as a “luminous vocation.” Light and movement are made visible differently in space and within each work. These are Mack’s contemplative and dynamic contribution to the experience of being in the world and a turning away from and resistance to both the sociopolitical chaos, cruelty and extreme violence that he lived through during Germany’s Third Reich, and the ongoing atrocities in other guises that continue in regions of our contemporary world.