Heinz Mack

Almine Rech and Fondation Le Corbusier are pleased to present Heinz Mack's solo exhibition at Maison La Roche in Paris, on view from October 21 to December 20, 2025. 

Heinz Mack (born in Lollar, 1931) is one of the primary figures of the art of the second half of the 20th century as he is considered to be a radical and revolutionary artist, who from the 1950s to today has continued to renew his vision and expressivity.  The works exhibited at Maison La Roche, architectural icon by Le Corbusier where light itself plays a highly significant role in redefining the coordinates of spaces and volumes, are dated between 1995 and 2021, explore the artist’s investigation and redefinition of the relationship between light, color, structure, and space.

Mack’s lifelong artistic production has always been investigating the fundamental role that light plays as a constitutive factor of vision, creating an impressive body of work that has radically changed the course of contemporary art. The dialogue between light and colour in relation to structure, vibration, and rhythm represents the central factor of the continuation and metamorphosis of Mack’s work. In these variations in the artist’ oeuvre, light is expressed in its purity as transformation of surfaces and spaces.

In 1957 (together with the colleague and friend Otto Piene in Düsseldorf), Mack founded the international movement ZERO: since then, he has experimented with a plurality of artistic techniques, in a variable continuity that has always considered light the very core of his pictorial and plastic investigations. Light is a central theme in Mack’s non-representational art, translated into paintings and sculptures of various materials – also monumental ones for public spaces, light reliefs, light cubes, light rotors, light stelae, drawings, pastels, ink drawings, graphics, photography, mosaics, ceramics, conceptual designs of public spaces and interiors, stage settings, as well as literary works.

For Mack, light is a concrete and active metaphor for a change in perspective, which is part of an overall vision of dynamic purification, a sort of active neutralization of reality, expressed in different ways. Mack’s fundamentally new attitude towards the pictorial surface and plastic form considers it not as a window and representative or evocative extension, but as independent zones of positive events, autonomous and vital spaces. He associates light with movement in its many forms (optical dynamism, mechanism in action, luminous pulsation, open process), in order to deconstruct and reinvent representational and executive conventions. His objective and regular rhythms bring colors beyond the margins of the individual artwork, translating it into a continuum that goes beyond the visual surface, transforming painting from a static object on the wall to an articulation of real space. Mack’s architectural painting and sculpture thus both inhabit and activate Le Corbusier’s luminous spaces, in an intertwined dialogue of two languages that are both driven by a vocation to essentiality.

The attention in the exhibition is particularly driven towards Mack’s works from most recent decades, particularly the pure colors of the “Chromatische Konstellationen” (chromatic constellations), whose stratification, juxtaposition, and gradation give to the surface of the canvas new and radiant tonal harmonies. It is from the liminal zone of colour, between light and dark, which Mack considers to be the germinal place of vision, that transition from black and white to colour matured in 1991, when the artist focused on new pictorial work that translates his intuitions for redefining surface and space into an unprecedented and surprising chromatic key.

It is an inebriating sound that comes from these constellations: a sensitive thought materialized in colour-light, phenomenological meditations, and concrete utopias, where the dialectic between concentration and chromatic-luminous rarefaction produces a sparkling dynamic, punctuated by harmonies and gradations, oscillations and sequences, pulsations and microstructures.

Mack’s paintings and sculptures, layered or juxtaposed, in counterpoint or gradation, articulate the spatiality of the surface and of the plastic form in new, radiant, tonal harmonies. The purity of colour translates into continuous vibrations, a colour without limits that unfolds its phenomenology of physicality, imposing on the viewer a total, immersive, engaging chromatic experience. 

Purity, together with light and polychromy, is another keyword linking directly Mack’s poetic world with Le Corbusier’s Modern Architecture: focusing on the dialectic of pure colors, Mack’s Chromatische Konstellationen (chromatic constellations), layered in transparency or juxtaposed in combination, counterpoint, or gradation, modulate and articulate the spatiality of the surface in new, radiant harmonies. Here we find the dynamic and active relationship between color, light, structure, and space that constitutes the conceptual core of these extraordinary structures of energy, both chromatic and physical.

— Francesca Pola, 'Heinz Mack at Maison La Roche: the purity of light and space'