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Artwork in Focus is the second chapter of the gallery's 'In Focus' series. Every week the gallery presents a viewing room featuring artworks that are available for purchase. This week we are presenting two works by Heinz Mack: Lamellar Sculpture with Eight Saw Blades (1954) and Sand Relief (1968). This viewing room is the final part of three presentations that explore Heinz Mack's practice. Our first two instalments exploring Mack's practice focused on his artistic relationship with more traditional media, including painting and works on paper. This final instalment presents two works which hold a lens to a more experimental approach within the artist's practice.
Lamellar Sculpture with Eight Saw Blades (1954) will be included in the Heinz Mack exhibition at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, which opens to the public on 11th February. The exhibition marks Heinz Mack's 90th birthday, and will focus on the first three decades of the artist's career, with important and rarely-shown works from major institutions and private collections from around the world.
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Heinz MACKb. 1931Lamellar Sculpture with Eight Saw Blades, 1954Saw blades, wood
Signed and dated lower centre 'MacK 54'21.4 x 72 x 15.6 cm
8 ⅜ x 28 ⅜ x 6 ⅛ in -
Lamellar Sculpture with Eight Saw Blades (1954), was produced before Mack's involvement in the ZERO group. Mack created this sculpture at the age of 23, following a trip to Bordeaux. This trip was his first encounter with the sea, having grown up in the heart of Germany, 500 miles away from the coastline. The very saw blades used to carve elements of this work have been reincorporated into the final piece which lends the work a neatly circular logic. This choice gives Lamellar Sculpture with Eight Saw Blades a presence which coherently adheres with its conception. Throughout his career, Mack used the idea of 'sculpture' with flexibility, employing it as a tool to portray and create works at the crossroad between art and nature, sometimes considering his works as 'new objects in space', 'reflections of lights' or even 'instruments of motion'. This vision of a seascape is almost at odds with the rawness of the rusted metal, the serrated edges of the blades suggesting movement, like the waves of the sea.
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Heinz MACKb. 1931Sand Relief, 1968Synthetic resin and sand on wood, in artist's frame
Signed and dated on the back: 'Mack 68'89.5 x 100 x 9.3 cm
35 ¼ x 39 ⅜ x 3 ⅝ in -
Throughout his career, Mack used reliefs as intermediaries between two-dimensional and three dimensional artworks. When he founded the ZERO Group with Otto Piene, the artist declared that the 1950s abstractions "had painted the whole world, beside sky, air and light". The relief allowed him to integrate these elements in his artistic practice, acting as light catchers while at the same time possessing painterly qualities and shapes. In fact, as light and natural landscape became more central into Mack's work, the artist sensed that the means of painting were no longer sufficient to display his new artistic reality.
In 1959, Mack started drafting his Sahara Project, and in 1961 he published in "ZERO 3" further details of this project of immense spatial dimension, through which he was willing to create a "reservation of art in natural spaces". The incomparable light of the desert could outshine the works' materiality completely, while the sand stretched out below it as the ultimate natural relief. In Sand Relief (1968), we can see a continuation of Mack's interest in the use of sand in his practice, albeit on a much smaller scale. Mack's monumental desert-based works were fleeting and could only be captured through film and photographic documentation, however in Sand Relief, the combination of resin and sand makes permanent the markings that have been etched into the surface. The result is a piece with both bi and tridimensional features, at the intersection of painting and sculpture.
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Biography
Born in Lollar, Germany in 1931, Heinz Mack graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and subsequently acquired a degree in Philosophy at the University of Cologne in 1956. Following his studies, Mack started working with the Dynamic Structures, which he gradually transformed into paintings, drawings and reliefs, and, in 1957 founded the ZERO group with Otto Piene. Alongside his participation to Documenta II, III and the Venice Biennale, 1970. Heinz Mack's work has been exhibited in approximately 300 solo shows and numerous group exhibitions. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Tate Gallery in London.
Artwork in Focus: Two works by Heinz Mack (Part Three): Lamellar Sculpture with Eight Saw Blades (1954) and Sand Relief (1968)
Past viewing_room