About the work
The young Heinz Mack, who grew up in rural surroundings in Lollar in Hessen, was already interested in structures. He wandered through woods, fields and meadows and captured what he saw in photographs with the Leica of his uncle. Here he was not interested, for example, in the spectacular manifestations of the landscape, but instead in quieter, structured image details: closely ordered furrows, stacked logs or coniferous trees towering parallel.
This preference for planar structures and the principle of creating rows still accompany his work today. As also in this pastel, which, in terms of its compositional arrangement, resembles those colourful leaves that present themselves in a vertical progression of spectral colours and are provided with narrow bands in contrasting colourfulness at the side edges and at the top and bottom edges of the painting. However, the diversity of colour is now replaced by a fabric of multi-variant structures and patterns in black and white – in an abundance that leaves no room for regret at the absence of colour.
“The white on white, black on black of Malevich”, according to the artist, “marks the last reductions. From there the journey continued in the direction of structure. All ZERO artists, or all those that took part in this spirit for almost ten years, clearly worked in a completely structural way.”
Text authored and provided by Dr. Doris Hansmann, Art historian
Studies of art history, theater, film and television, English and Romance Languages at the University of Cologne, doctorated in 1994. Research assistant at the Art Museum Düsseldorf. Lecturer and project manager at Wienand Verlag, Cologne. Freelance work as an author, editor and book producer for publishers and museums in Germany and abroad. From 2011 chief editor at Wienand Verlag, from 2019 to 2021 senior editor at DCV, Dr. Cantz’sche Verlagsgesellschaft, Berlin. Numerous publications on the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.
