Heinz Mack

Heinz Mack has never stopped being an artistic pioneer. The multifaceted artist has created works across a wide variety of mediums including light art, sculpture, kinetic art, drawing, painting, photography, and land art. Underlying every work across his oeuvre is a fascination with the possibilities of time, space, and perception. Heinz Mack was born in Lollar, Germany in 1933. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf and studied philosophy at the University of Cologne. In 1957 he co-founded the ZERO group with his friend and fellow artist Otto Piene. ZERO emerged from the wreckage of the Second World War as an optimistic proposition of rebirth, a chance to start anew. Responding to the prominent postwar art movements—Art Informel and Tachisme in Europe and Abstract Expressionism in America—ZERO endeavored to create an entirely new artistic vocabulary. Mack and Piene wanted to take the focus away from the artist and recenter it on the work and its own materiality. They rejected the subjectivity of other avant-garde groups and advocated instead for work that focused on concepts like light, form, movement, and the senses.

Mack and Piene began organizing informal meetings in their studios. Called Abendausstellung or “night exhibitions,” the gatherings presented arrangements of various elements including light, sound, a poem, or a color, together for one night only. In 1961, Günther Uecker joined ZERO as the group’s third member. In the five years that followed, until ZERO’s final show, no additional members were added. But many other artists and creatives became tangentially involved in the style, including Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and Lucio Fontana. ZERO was a nebulous collective, often referred to by scholars as a “network” rather than a “movement.” Today ZERO is recognized as a watershed moment for postwar art. In 2014 an exhibition entitled ‘ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s’ opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, before traveling to the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul. 

The sensibility of ZERO stayed with Mack for the rest of his career. Experiments with what were at the time deemed unconventional materials—metal, glass, and mechanical elements— continued in his later work. Carrying these lessons with him, he forged ahead, always in search of new forms of expression. Mack’s interest in land art began in 1959 with the conception of his Sahara Project.

His idea to place large-scale works that interrogate light and movement within natural landscapes first came to fruition in 1962. In 1976, another major land art project brought the artist to a completely different kind of wilderness, that of the Arctic Ocean.

Mack has brought his interest in placing monumental sculptures in unexpected locations to a wider audience, designing a plaza for Frankfurt, a fountain for Düsseldorf, and a polished steel column for Langenfeld, Germany. His sculpture The Sky Over Nine Columns, created for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, has since been displayed in Istanbul, Valencia, and on the shores of Lake St. Moritz. 

Painting has always been an essential part of Mack’s artistic practice. Among his first works were abstract, monochromatic paintings he fervently produced in the 1950s as part of his Dynamic Structures series. After ZERO, the artist abstained from painting for a time. In 1991 Mack painted his first Chromatic Constellation. His recent paintings are drenched with vivid pigments, exploring the unending possibilities of color theory. 

Mack is acclaimed both at home and abroad. He took part in the seminal contemporary art exhibitions documenta III and documenta VI in 1964 and 1977. Mack was a visiting professor at Osaka University of Arts in 1970, the same year the artist represented the Federal Republic of Germany at the XXXVth Venice Biennale. He was tasked with creating a monumental outdoor sculpture for the 1972 Munich Olympics. Mack was a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin until 1992 and became an honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf in 2015. Among the numerous honors Mack has received over the course of his career are the Premio Marzotto in 1963, the Premier Prix Arts Plastiques at the 1965 Paris Biennale, the Order of Merit of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1992, the Grand Federal Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2011, and in 2017 the Moses Mendelssohn Medal. Monographic exhibitions have been held at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Pergamonmuseum, Berlin, among many others.