About the work
The work in pastel chalk on handmade paper with handmade craftsman’s frame and non-glare, UV-absorbing glass from 2021 greets viewers in the brilliant colours of the entire spectrum. In 2022, Heinz Mack’s works were shown in a retrospective exhibition in the supporting programme of the 59th Biennale di Venezia, where he had already experienced success in 1970 as a young artist, around 50 years ago.
In his works, Mack occupies himself like no other with the theme of light. Light, electromagnetic radiation, is not colourless, as we presume. Guided through a prism, it divides into the spectral colours violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. Heinz Mack varies the sequence here to ultramarine blue, red, yellow, green and violet, neglecting the orange hue. Through his work with the spectral colours, the painter also occupies himself with the process of seeing in itself. He makes light, which we do not actually see but without which seeing would not be possible, visible.
In his works, Heinz Mack neither pursues an expressionist manifestation, nor is he interested in self-expression as an artist. Instead, he shows colour experiments and colour analyses. These are objective works, so to speak.
The colours here are arranged in parallel vertical bands next to one another, two horizontal stripes of colour in purple-rose or fuchsia at the top and bottom edges of the painting delimit these middle bands of colour. Of decisive importance here is that these are not colour fields clearly separated from one another, but instead that there are overlaps and overpaintings, which lend the various colour segments their spatial expression.
Text authored and provided by Dr Andrea Fink, art historian
The art historian, curator and freelance publicist Andrea Fink studied art history, cultural studies and humanities, modern history and philosophy in Bochum and Vienna. Doctorate in 2007 on the work of the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. As a freelance curator and art consultant, her clients include, among others, the Kunstverein (art association) Ahlen, Kunstverein Soest, Wella Museum, Museum am Ostwall Dortmund, ThyssenKrupp AG, Kulturstiftung Ruhr, Osthaus Museum Hagen, Franz Haniel GmbH, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria.
