Heinz Mack

Lichtfeld II, 1966-67

Heinz Mack, together with Otto Piene, was co-founder in 1958 of the ‘Zero’ Group and the same-named magazine, one of Europe’s most important post-war avant-garde forums. In the 1960s, Mack devised a paradigm for minimalizing pictorial objects, objectifying artistic devices and redefining them through an unemotional artistic subjectivity functioning anti-biographically. The key feature for Mack is a return to the roots of German philosophy and intellectual history, which can be seen above all in the recurrence of light as subject matter throughout his œuvre. Smoothly polished metal and a fine-meshed grid structure form the surface of Lichtfeld II [Light field II], revealing – according to lighting conditions and viewpoint – different sculptural and painterly aspects of the picture object.