About the work
Light has been at the centre of the art of Heinz Mack since the 1950s. Like with no other artist, light has become the material for his artistic work. With the statement “The abstract art of the post-war period had painted the world full. We only have the sky now”, Mack initiated a complete renewal of dealings with form and colour in contemporary art. He was already interested during his school years in the morphology and the theory of colours of Goethe, which strived to conceive of and describe colour in its entirety. Goethe developed a colour circle of six colours. The colours were also assigned to the four areas of human intellectual and spiritual life: red/yellow-red — reason, yellow/green — intellect, green/blue — sensuality, blue red/red — imagination.
Heinz Mack initially quit painting in favour of sculpture in 1968 and only found his way back to it in 1991. From this point on, Mack’s painting evolved once again, and he developed one of the most innovative approaches to painting in the present. It would be fair to describe him as one of the greatest colour painters of the post-war period in art. Mack is able to manifest light in his work through colour.
1 Quoted from: Robert Fleck, Mack. Die Sprache der Farbe, Bielefeld 2021, p. 7.
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.
