Robert Mangold: Paintings and Drawings 1984-1997

Softcover | 24.3 X 1.8 X 29 CM | 238 pp

Museum Weisbaden | 1998 | 9783892580386

Text in English and German

Published to accompany an exhibition at Museum Weisbaden in 1998 to mark the award of The Alexei von Jawlensky Prize.

Robert Mangold (b. 1937) has, since the 1950s, explored line and colour on supports ranging in shape, size, and dimension. Committed to abstraction as a means of communication, he has worked within a consistent geometric vocabulary to produce a varied body of paintings and works on paper.

Mangold's career has developed through an evolution of techniques for the application of paint onto his chosen surface—first plywood and masonite, and later, beginning in 1968, stretched canvas. Moving away from the conventions of paintings, he introduced shaped canvases, working with symmetrical and asymmetrical forms as well as curvilinear edges. For his early shaped and multi-panel constructions, Mangold airbrushed oil-based pigments in gradations of colour, and later used a roller before ultimately adopting a brush to apply acrylic in subtle hues that near transparency. He remained intrigued by color as much as structure, and his relationship with it shifted throughout the decades. His initial palette, inspired by industrial objects—file cabinets, brick walls, and trucks—transitioned toward colors that evoke mood: warm ochres, light blues, deep oranges, olive greens, and other hues. Mangold’s mostly monochromatic compositions show an attention to gesture with the addition of hand-drawn pencil lines that curve across the planes of color.