Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich Fischbach Gallery, New York Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf John Weber Gallery, New York Gilman Paper Company, New York Sale: Christie’s, New York, Minimal and Conceptual Art from the Gilman Paper Company, May 5, 1987, lot 23 Private Collection Sale: Sotheby’s, New York, Contemporary Part I, May 14, 2008, lot 76 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Exhibited
New York, Fischbach Gallery, Robert Mangold, February - March, 1969 Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art, One Man's Choice, December 14, 1969 - January 18, 1970 New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Robert Mangold, November 18, 1971 - January 2, 1972 Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Three Decades: The Oliver Hoffman Collection, December 17, 1988 – February 5, 1989
Literature
D. Waldman, Robert Mangold, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1971, cat. no. 11 (illustrated) S. Singer, Robert Mangold, Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, 1982, cat. no. 82 (diagram illustrated)
Catalogue Essay
I was sitting there looking at curved hills and I started doing some funny kind of landscape works that had a slightly atmospheric rectangular top and then a curved bottom. I think it may have come from that summer where I was just looking at that space in nature, but when I got back to the city I started working with a compass curve, in a sense, and did a series of paintings that were parts of circles, a half circle broken in different ways.
ROBERT MANGOLD
(Robert Mangold, “In Conversation: Robert Mangold with John Yau”, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2009).
Influenced early on by the New York Abstract Expressionists, Robert Mangold would later derive inspiration from Pop Art with its broader investigation of subject matter before experimenting with Minimalism, with which he would remain associated from there on. Line and shape are prominent themes throughout Mangold’s body of work, as exemplified in the present lot, 1/2 V Series, 1968. Shape is a point of departure while line is a conceptual presence within the shapes. While Minimalists were conceptually driven, establishing theory within practice, Mangold found himself reacting to color and environment in a visceral way that distinguished his practice from his contemporaries. Early on, monochromatic surfaces were applied with a roller as to avoid the intimate trace of a brush stoke– “surface incidents” – and color was inspired from Mangold’s immediate mundane environment: filing cabinets, school buses, subway stations and loft buildings.
Urbanism and architecture are certainly present throughout the artist’s production; however, his later artwork evokes classical themes and motifs found in Greek and Pueblo pottery—reflected in the present lot through the use of an earthy celadon color. In this way, the notion of containment in 1/2 V Series, 1968, is closely connected to three dimensional objects; Masonite panels form a container, a vessel for the artist’s drafted image. Considering the possibilities of geometrical forms through structured planes, Mangold’s 1/2 V Series, 1968, transforms the hard-edge line of the letter V through repetition into a geometrical zigzagging motif. The artist has asserted line and motif through densely applied graphite, creating a unified space confined within two quarter circle panels, which then form a semi-circle. Here, drawing within painting, forms a bridge-like structure, revealing a “certain kind of existence within their tension, their combination.” (Robert Mangold, “In Conversation: Robert Mangold with John Yau”, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2009).
1968 acrylic and graphite on masonite, in two panels each: 48 x 48 in. (121.9 x 121.9 cm)
overall: 48 x 96 in. (121.9 x 243.8 cm) Each signed and titled “R. Mangold, 1/2 V Series” on the reverse. Also dated 1968 on the reverse of the right panel.