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.

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.