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Lot Essay
Spanning almost two metres in width, the present work is a large-scale study from Robert Mangold’s celebrated Curved Plane/Figure series. Confronting the viewer as a near-architectural construct, its semicircular form consists of three coloured strips, inscribed with three intersecting ellipses. Acquired by Roger and Josette Vanthournout the year after its completion, the work is the second of two studies for Curved Plane/Figure VII, the first of which is held in the Cleveland Museum of Art. The series was inspired by a lunette drawing of St Cecilia by the Italian Mannerist painter Jacopo Pontormo. With a copy hanging above his desk in his new spacious, sky-lit barn studio, Mangold produced a series of eleven variations and related studies between 1994 and 1996. The cycle gave rise to some of his most elegant creations, their curved forms standing in smooth contrast to his earlier angular contours. Unlike many of its companions, which present themselves as fragments, the present work traces the full arc of the half-circle, its dome-like form and triptych format infused with the drama and grandeur of a Renaissance fresco.
The Curved Plane/Figure works take their place within a practice defined by its rigorous questioning of art’s objecthood. Since the 1960s, Mangold’s works have probed the relationship between painting and wall, upending the notion of the canvas as a window onto the world and positing it instead as a space in its own right. ‘I saw my painting neither as Painting as Window/Illusion nor Painting as Object’, he wrote. ‘This flat, altered shape, picture plane, existing before you like a wall, that you could neither enter nor treat as an object, was painting’s essence … Painting you relate to like architecture in a scale related to human size’ (R. Mangold quoted in N. Princenthal, ‘A Survey of the Paintings’, in R. Shiff et al. (eds.), Robert Mangold, London 2000, p. 262). Combining shaped canvases with bold colours and nested geometries, his works no longer simply adorned the wall, but rather became part of it.
While Mangold’s practice shares much in common with the work of artists such Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, he rejected allegiance to the term ‘Minimalism’. The Curved Plane/Figure paintings, indeed, play freely with the age-old relationship between figure and ground, inviting comparisons with Barnett Newman’s ‘zips’, Henri Matisse’s ‘cut-outs’ and the perspectival theatre of Piero della Francesca. Central to this dialogue was Mangold’s use of drawn elliptical patterns. Whilst graphic elements had long played a role in his practice, it was not until the preceding Plane/Figure series of 1992-1994 that the artist began to explore the counterpoint between different geometric layers in earnest. Mangold would draw his shapes, paint over them and then redraw them, embedding them in the very fabric of the work like ancient inscriptions. Here, they interrupt the regularity of the underlying strips of colour, imbuing the work with a sense of optical depth.
The Curved Plane/Figure works take their place within a practice defined by its rigorous questioning of art’s objecthood. Since the 1960s, Mangold’s works have probed the relationship between painting and wall, upending the notion of the canvas as a window onto the world and positing it instead as a space in its own right. ‘I saw my painting neither as Painting as Window/Illusion nor Painting as Object’, he wrote. ‘This flat, altered shape, picture plane, existing before you like a wall, that you could neither enter nor treat as an object, was painting’s essence … Painting you relate to like architecture in a scale related to human size’ (R. Mangold quoted in N. Princenthal, ‘A Survey of the Paintings’, in R. Shiff et al. (eds.), Robert Mangold, London 2000, p. 262). Combining shaped canvases with bold colours and nested geometries, his works no longer simply adorned the wall, but rather became part of it.
While Mangold’s practice shares much in common with the work of artists such Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, he rejected allegiance to the term ‘Minimalism’. The Curved Plane/Figure paintings, indeed, play freely with the age-old relationship between figure and ground, inviting comparisons with Barnett Newman’s ‘zips’, Henri Matisse’s ‘cut-outs’ and the perspectival theatre of Piero della Francesca. Central to this dialogue was Mangold’s use of drawn elliptical patterns. Whilst graphic elements had long played a role in his practice, it was not until the preceding Plane/Figure series of 1992-1994 that the artist began to explore the counterpoint between different geometric layers in earnest. Mangold would draw his shapes, paint over them and then redraw them, embedding them in the very fabric of the work like ancient inscriptions. Here, they interrupt the regularity of the underlying strips of colour, imbuing the work with a sense of optical depth.