Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago Nordenhake Gallery, Stockholm and Berlin L.A. Louver, Los Angeles (acquired from the above) Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1986
Catalogue Essay
“I’ve always had the desire to make the work be a unity…I wanted the elements, which were the periphery line and the internal line, the surface, color, etc., to be equal. I wanted them to be so totally locked together that they were inseparable. No one area of the painting should be more important than another – even the idea” - Robert Mangold
Vivid in color and subtle in silhouette, Robert Mangold’s Untitled from 1979 occupies the liminal space between picture and object. From the onset of his career, Mangold championed the expressive and direct power of Minimalist art. Yet unlike many of his contemporaries, who began working in sculpture and the three-dimensional sphere, Mangold maintained an unwavering commitment to painting as a viable and essential art form. Challenged by the limitations of the traditional canvas, he developed a new system of irregular, shaped canvases, often comprised of multiple parts, without any sacrifice to what he termed the most essential component of painting – the planar identity of the canvas surface.
Untitled is a studied exploration of geometric rigor, in which Mangold investigates the tension between color, surface, line and shape. The painting is comprised of three adjoined canvases, unified by their bright marigold hue and the singular graphite rectangle that extends across all three elements. Equally important to the drawn graphite line are the internal canvas borders, which extend across the composition as integral components of the pictorial field. Despite being comprised of several parts, Mangold considered his paintings to be self-contained, holistic objects, united by the flat formality of the canvas plane. In Untitled, the repetition of rectangular forms – both in the shapes of the canvases and the graphite line – adds a further sense of cohesion, creating a composition that transcends the limitations of painting as a traditional art form.
signed, titled and dated "R Mangold Untitled 1979" on the reverse acrylic and pencil on canvas, in 3 parts 51 x 42 in. (129.5 x 106.7 cm.) Executed in 1979.