About the work
Impressed by all conceivable earthly impressions of light and colour, Heinz Mack captures these and reproduces them artistically as an extract, in order to sensitise our consciousness to the abundance of the colour spectrum. Light and colour do not exist separately for Heinz Mack. Thus, he repeatedly expresses light as colour for his public over the course of his artistic career, now spanning more than seven decades.
Here, Heinz Mack presents a colour development from orange to yellow and once again through orange to red in a horizontally ascending gradation. The chromatic colours are on the one hand delimited from one another and can be experienced as individual colour values but respectively develop visibly into the next colour grade. This impression is intensified both by the colour-immanent patterning and by the fine, vertically progressing, mostly red and orange lines in the background. There are also overlaps of the individual colour hues. In this ambivalence, the Farbchromatik 3050 nonetheless seems dynamic with its reduced clarity. Through the spectral colours, the work automatically generates both an intensive harmony and a brilliant charisma. Mack himself once referred to this expression as “vibration of colour”(1). It radiates out of its form far beyond the edge of the painting.
1 Cited from: Mack. Das Licht meiner Farben, exhib. cat. Ulmer Museum 2015/16, Dortmund 2015, p. 15.
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.
