About the work
In this painting, Heinz Mack no longer shows colour as a hue but instead as a sensitive modulation of various gradations of the colour white or silver-grey, as the title of this Chromatic Constellation already describes. Colour is defined here through non-colourfulness. Although this painting has hardly any colour, it generates colour effects that shimmer translucently through the colourless areas. Mack already created works in the 1950s that show, for example, linear, white, dynamic structures on a grey, monochrome area, which appear to expand endlessly. In this work too, the degrees point beyond the actual image composition, although they are delimited from the sides by delicate turquoise and yellow, vertical bars of colour. The staggering of the degrees and the white square floating above them also results in an intensive impression of depth. The pictorial space thus also expands through optical means inherent to the painting. Mack himself described his goal as follows: “Painting, as a dynamic structure that is entirely self-sufficient, presents a new vitality of painterly nuance!(...) The exclusivity of a completely non-representational, dynamically artistic structure, at an astronomical distance from nature, becomes the expression of a pure emotion; it presents itself as a new reality, the secret beauty of which we intuit.”
Light is the shaping energy of the art of Heinz Mack. Due to the ostensible absence of colour, light indeed appears as a theme, intensified as a colourless medium in “Stufen Silbergrau”, but the colour is subtly present and is also seen.
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.
