Robert Mangold

Manila – Neutral Area is one of Robert Mangold’s Walls and Areas works of the mid-1960s. Although nonrepresentational, the series has roots in reality, as it was inspired by the architecture of lower Manhattan, where the artist moved in 1962. The notch in the left panel evokes a roof overhang, the division between the two panels suggests the borderline between two adjacent buildings, and the scale of the work—roughly eight by eight feet—is architectonic. “Shape is the first element in my work . . . everything starts there,” Mangold has stated. While the artist used the mechanical method of spraying paint on composition board, the work’s gentle gradations of color from buff to ivory conjure handmade effects.

Mangold was part of the generation of artists who came to prominence in New York in the 1960s under the rubric of Minimalism. Like Robert Ryman and Sol LeWitt, Mangold was interested in the perceptual possibilities engendered by small permutations within a limited set of formal variables. For Mangold, these elements were line, shape, and color, which he has combined over the course of a long career in varying, and frequently unexpected, ways. Most of his paintings and wooden constructions involve large, spare geometric units that are often parceled into smaller internal divisions. By limiting his pictorial means, the artist trains our attention on subtleties of form and composition. One takes in a Mangold work all at once, rather intuitively, but its perceptual nuances invite sustained contemplation.