New York – Pace Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Robert Mangold’s most recent paintings, marking the artist’s sixteenth show with the gallery since joining it twenty-nine years ago. The exhibition features works centering on the formal possibilities of the square, as well as implied space, and will be on view September 17 – October 24, 2020 at 540 West 25th Street, New York. Distilling Mangold’s lifelong exploration of the perceptual tensions among shape, line, color, and surface, these new works epitomize the conceptual rigor and aesthetic sophistication of his six-decade career, while also demonstrating the artist’s enduring will to probe the fundamental questions of painting.

Driven by experimentation, Mangold’s new body of work reconsiders the implications of some of his most seminal paintings and often breaks with recent precedent. In Two Squares Within a Double Square (2017), for example, the flatness characterizing much of Mangold’s work is disrupted by the presence of a raised square, forcing the painting to engage with three-dimensional space in a manner not seen in Mangold's art since his Wall paintings of the mid-sixties. With Two Merging Squares (2019), the elegant graphite lines that have served to activate the surfaces of his canvases are no longer required for the work to stage a tension between its tacit internal geometry and the irregular shape of its perimeter. Color, too, undergoes a calculated shift. In works such as 3 Square Structure (2018), Mangold turns away from the neutral shades typical of his work of the sixties but also refrains from replicating the bolder hues of his art of the 1980s, opting instead for a middle ground: a strong yet sober red. Standing before these new works, viewers can experience another of Mangold’s dialectical tours de force—an art simultaneously oriented toward the past and the future.