Robert Mangold:
“I’ve always had the desire to make the work be a unity, and I wanted nothing to be ahead of anything else…I wanted the elements to be equal.”—–Robert Mangold uses, in a nonhierarchical fashion, four elements: outside shape, plane of color(s), drawn line(s), and in some works, physical divisions. With just these four elements, Mangold creates tensions between austerity and sensuality, complexity and simplicity, contingency and independence, delicacy and power, drama and stillness, drawn edge and physical edge, exterior and interior, intuition and precision, lightness and weight of color, and parts and the whole, among many others. The works in this exhibition, all made between 1990 and 1995, present the artist’s sensitive and specific approach to making paintings to work in for both the eye and the mind.Mangold’s work has been the subject of numerous single-person exhibitions and retrospectives at institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; Akron Art Museum; Hallen für neue Kunst, Schaffhausen, Switzerland; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College; Hallen für neue Kunst; Museum Wiesbaden; Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London; and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, among others.