About the work
The Chromatische Konstellation 308 is also based on a playful and inventive treatment of the colour spectrum, which is fundamental for the work of Heinz Mack. The ingenuity and the compositional skill of the artist, born in 1931, remains both unabated and incomparable to the present day. The artist repeatedly finds new constellations when he distorts, dissects and recombines the colours of the spectrum in various ways. In this painting we find various rectangular forms superimposed onto and adjacent to one another. The central colour fields are kept in the ultramarine blue especially characteristic of Mack’s work. The rectangles placed in the middle are enclosed by narrow stripes of colour. The tower-like, stacked, ultramarine forms seem virtually three-dimensional due to the superimpositions. Amongst themselves, the various blue and green values develop quite harmoniously, just as the colour development from orange to yellow arranged on the canvas to the right is designed entirely melodiously. The outer colour elements create a framing of the centre composition within the painting, which is in this way emphasised again. Mack’s colour compositions instinctively acquire a musical connotation: “The painterly processes of Heinz Mack, from the ZERO painting to the Chromatische Konstellationen, have similarities with the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schönberg, with the restriction to a manageable tone material, which is in this case of a chromatic nature, and with processes like repetition, reverse motion, crab movement, etc.”1
1 Cited from: Robert Fleck, Antonia Lehmann-Tolkmitt, Heinz Mack. Ein Künstler des 21. Jahrhunderts, Munich 2019, pp. 98/99.
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.
