About the work
A row of wide, horizontal bars defines the “Chromatische Konstellation” of the year 2015. From top to bottom, its palette develops from a warm-hued red through orange, yellow and green to turquoise-coloured stripes at the bottom edge of the painting. The painting appears like a lesson on the prismatic refraction of white light, and thus the dissection into its colourful spectrum of the rainbow with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
However, it would be a great mistake to reduce the artist and his work to the representation of the physical components of light. Mack is an absolutely dedicated painter and thus allows his colour spectrum at the outer edges of the painting to be accompanied by two narrow widths from the turquoise spectrum that also follow the horizontal gradation.
“The relationships between the white light and the colours contained within it, from which it is composed, are of interest not only to scientists, but also to artists”, Heinz Mack explains in an interview. “Light diffraction, light refraction, interferences, polarisation, reflection – all of these manifestations, which can be explained, appear in my light-kinetics experiments. In my painting, I appreciate that the contrasts in which the pure, almost monochrome colours exist in relation to one another are on the one hand vitally and sensually present but are on the other hand complemented by transitions and extremely differentiated nuances and are in this way enlivened. That is what I mean when I call my paintings ‘Chromatische Konstellationen’.”
( Doris Hansmann )
Text authored and provided by Dr. Doris Hansmann, Art historian
Studies of art history, theater, film and television, English and Romance Languages at the University of Cologne, doctorated in 1994. Research assistant at the Art Museum Düsseldorf. Lecturer and project manager at Wienand Verlag, Cologne. Freelance work as an author, editor and book producer for publishers and museums in Germany and abroad. From 2011 chief editor at Wienand Verlag, since 2018 senior editor at DCV, Dr. Cantz’sche Verlagsgesellschaft, Berlin. Numerous publications on the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.
