Heinz Mack. ZERO Painting. Catalogue Raisonné

Heinz Mack is best known for his sculptures and reliefs. At the beginning of his search for new forms of artistic expression, however, was painting.

The »catalogue raisonné« of his ZERO painting reveals this and thus enables several unexpected discoveries concerning the intensity, the number, and the scope of his painterly oeuvre in the ZERO period, showing around 450 paintings from this phase of works for the first time.

In contrast to the Informel, Mack developed his first »Dynamic Structures« in 1956 – paintings in which traditional colorism is contrasted in a unique way with a painting of light, and structure replaces the composition. The use of color and grid-like structures, which are increasingly restricted to black and white, creates new surfaces that seem to vibrate and that look like three-dimensional reliefs. In spite of the radical limitation of the medium, no one painting resembles the other. Focusing on the early works of the ZERO era, the book provides an essential contribution to understanding Mack's oeuvre.

At the same time, the catalog raises an important prerequisite in recent German art history and creates a missing link in the history of contemporary art. It shows the extent to which Mack's painterly work during the ZERO years, with his radical color reduction and concentration on light and rhythm, was groundbreaking for international art post-1945.

»Beautifully designed, perfectly printed, finely bound.«
Informationsdienst Kunst

Artist: Heinz Mack
Editor: Robert Fleck in Zusammenarbeit mit Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art
Text: Edouard Derom, Robert Fleck, Andrea Knop, Bettina Weiand

English, German
Hardcover, Schuber, 26,5 × 30 cm
432 pages, 535 illustrations

Available works of the artist

Heinz Mack, untitled, 2020, © Heinz Mack + VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Heinz Mack, untitled, 2016, © Heinz Mack + VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Heinz Mack, untitled, 2016, © Heinz Mack + VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Heinz Mack, untitled, 2015, © Heinz Mack + VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Associated exhibition

Heinz Mack. ZERO-Painting

Dusseldorf / 16 September – 1 October 2017

The ZERO movement developed from 1957—sixty years ago—in the wake of Heinz Mack and Otto Piene’s studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was made official in 1958 with the first issueof the...

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