Heinz Mack - Zero Painting - Catalogue Raisonné 1956-1968

Heinz Mack (1931-)

Heinz Mack is famous above all for his sculptures and reliefs. The starting point of his search for new artistic forms of expression, however, was painting. This publication documents for the first time Mack’s painting during the ZERO years, whose radical colour reduction and concentration on light and rhythm were path-setting for international art during the years after 1945.

In 1956, unlike art informel, Mack developed his first Dynamic Structures – paintings in which in a singular manner a painting of light is contrasted with traditional colourism and structure replaces composition. He created new surfaces which appear to vibrate and which give the impression of three-dimensional reliefs by means of a use of colour which was increasingly reduced to black and white and grid-like structures. Despite the radical restriction of means no two paintings are alike. In its focus on the early works of the ZERO period, this volume provides an indispensable key to an understanding of Mack’s work as a whole.