John Chiaverina is a writer based in New York City. He has contributed to publications including ARTnews and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. He is currently editorial coordinator for the music platform Nina.
For close to seven decades, the German artist Heinz Mack has been making paintings and sculptures that harness and explore the intrinsic beauty of light.
Mack sealed his place in art history in 1957 when, as a new graduate from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he co-founded the ZERO movement, a loose collective of artists concerned with the fundamentals of color, space, and motion. ZERO’s sleek, minimal aesthetic set out a new vision for post-war art that would prove influential for a constellation of artists worldwide, including Yves Klein and Yayoi Kusama.
The group disbanded in 1966 and Mack went on to produce some of his best-known works. In the Sahara Project, an idea first conceived in 1959, he installed a series of light-reflecting sculptures in the Tunisian desert that seemed to play with the inherent otherworldliness of that landscape. The ephemeral work was captured in the 1968 film Tele-Mack. The artist appears decked out in a silvery space-age suit to match his gleaming sculptures—so numinous that it’s hard to believe they weren’t created with special effects technology. In a sense, they were: the special effect was light.
Heinz Mack, Untitled, 2020, Glazed ceramic, burnished platinum, 86.5 x 19.5 x 15.5 cm (Plinth: 1 x 27 x 30 cm), © Archive Heinz Mack
What is less remembered is Mack’s ceramics practice, which blossomed in the 1990s and continues to this day. It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the artist’s oeuvre that his work with clay and fire serves as an extension of his lifelong obsession with luminosity. “He adapts the medium of ceramics to his idea to work directly with light,” explains the scholar and Mack biographer Robert Fleck, professor of art and the public sphere at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
For this year’s Independent 20th Century, Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art in collaboration with the Mack Foundation will present a solo exhibition focused on ceramic work made by the artist in the 1990s and 2010s.
Though Mack had used clay in the creation of maquettes for larger sculptures, it wasn’t until the 1990s that he became prolific in the medium, producing a staggering 200 works in 1997 alone. One untitled piece from that year, which will feature in the Independent show, is a lopsided geometric shape glazed in burnished gold. “The coating of the ceramics creates a certain kind of an optical effect,” Fleck observes. A work from 20 years later has a similar metallic iridescence, this time glazed with burnished platinum.
“Compared to the ceramics of contemporary artists, I have to say that I have not produced plates and vases like Picasso or archaic patinas like Miró,” says Mack in a written interview. “From the very beginning of my work with clay, I had the intention of making this kind of work with my strict feeling for sculpture.”
Heinz Mack, Untitled, 2017, Glazed ceramic, burnished platinum, 31 x 30 x 30 cm, © Archive Heinz Mack
Heinz Mack, Untitled, 2016, Glazed ceramic, burnished gold, 49 x 40 x 4 cm, © Archive Heinz Mack
Heinz Mack, Untitled, 1997, Glazed ceramic, 45 x 40 x 5.5 cm, © Archive Heinz Mack
The connection between Mack’s primary artistic media and the smaller-scale ceramics coming to Independent is evident—it’s all in the surfaces. “I pay attention to the surfaces of my sculptures from the fire, as the light should be refracted, reflected, inhaled, and exhaled, just as in my light reliefs,” Mack says, referring to his pivotal ZERO-era works in polished aluminum. Indeed, an untitled ceramic from 2016 assumes the form of a relief, a grid-like pattern of burnished gold.
“I appreciate gold, silver, platinum, white or deep black color, but also very clear intense monochrome colors,” Mack adds. “In this sense, there is a close relationship to my paintings.” A piece from 1997 offers a pure starburst of yellow.
Mack’s ceramic sculptures can give the viewer a sense of temporal vertigo. They are somehow both elemental and futuristic, of our time and a continuum with an ancient practice. In many ways, they are the perfect form for the 93-year-old artist to push his more forward-thinking ideas into the shadow of history.
“Ceramics are not only among the oldest artifacts known to mankind, but have also survived for thousands of years without showing the slightest trace of patina,” he says. “Perhaps in old age the artist has a deeper, unconscious interest in objects that can become very old with dignity.”
John Chiaverina is a writer based in New York City. He has contributed to publications including ARTnews and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. He is currently editorial coordinator for the music platform Nina.