About the work
While many paintings of Heinz Mack convince with their loosely woven surface structure of colours transitioning into one another, others, particularly those in acrylic on canvas, tread a different, no less charming path. Their bearing is characterised by a certain formal coherence. Shades of a single colour spectrum not uncommonly dominate the painting – finely nuanced and subtly graduated in clearly delineated areas, interlocking with one another at their edges with animated brushstrokes and punctuated by small insertions of a different colouring, which enters into an exciting dialogue with the ground colour. It is squares and rectangles, triangles and rhombuses that define Mack’s non-representational paintings, forms that are reminiscent of his sculpture from a distance and at the same time achieve a sense of urgency in their two-dimensionality that is in no way inferior to that of the sculpture.
As is the case here, in a painting from the year 2001/02 with the associative title “Farbe im Spiegel (Colours in the Mirror)”. Here, Mack allows his colours to speak, gives them space to develop, while the form provides them with structure and a foothold without distracting from them. “The colours are an expression of the soul”, Heinz Mack confides, “whereas the forms express the spiritual.”
( 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, from 2019 to 2021 senior editor at DCV, Dr. Cantz’sche Verlagsgesellschaft, Berlin. Numerous publications on the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.
