Picture "January (From 12 Months)" (1990)
Picture "January (From 12 Months)" (1990)
Quick info
limited, 75 copies | numbered | signed | colour screenprint on copperplate | framed | size 137 x 107 cm
Detailed description
Picture "January (From 12 Months)" (1990)
Inspired by the phenomena of the different seasons, Heinz Mack composed a series of works titled "12 Months", which take up the typical colour palette of each individual month. In its seriality, the cycle represents the endlessly recurring course of the year, while the light and dark of the chromatically graduated colour surfaces approximate the palette of nature.
However, the non-representational and geometric screenprints are completely removed from nature and elevate structure and form to an equally important pictorial object. The prints were published as editions by the artist and signed by him.
Original colour silkscreen, 1990. Edition: 75 copies on handmade paper, numbered and signed by hand. Motif size/sheet size 125 x 95 cm. Size in frame 137 x 107 cm as shown.
About Heinz Mack
Together with Otto Piene and Günther Uecker, Heinz Mack brought a breath of fresh air to the art scene through the artist group ZERO from the end of the 1950s onwards. He made light his central artistic theme, which he explored in countless sculptures, graphics, and pictures as well as in the design of public spaces during his more than 50-year career. Mack particularly appreciates the inner logic and discipline of graphic art and describes it as the "language of his hand".
Mack, born in 1931, is a multiple documenta participant, represented Germany at the 1970 Venice Biennale and is a recipient of the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. His works are represented in well over 100 collections, and renowned art houses worldwide regularly show his work.
The initial spark for Mack's exploration of light is a coincidence. He stepped on a piece of metal foil lying on a carpet. The step left behind a pattern that swayed dynamically in the light. Mack transformed light into his medium, experimenting with it in spatial installations, objects, sculptures, and on canvases. He places legendary light installations in the Sahara and thus became a pioneer of Land Art. Through his experiments, he anticipated what artists like Olafur Eliasson successfully do today. With scientific curiosity, he uses reflections and materials such as metal mesh or aluminium. "I love colour as a medium in which light is expressed. It's so beautiful that we live in a colourful world" (Heinz Mack).
The Italian avant-garde artist Lucio Fontana said in 1964 about the work of Heinz Mack: "The quality of light to be pure continuity is the problem Heinz Mack develops in his work. It is his intention to simplify the visible. He reduces it to what constitutes its essence. His goal is to represent not the optical-visual shape within a merely aesthetic order, but the unmediated idea, which has the merit of being pure information."
Term for paintings and sculptures that are detached from the representational depiction, which spread throughout the entire western and parts of the eastern world from around 1910 onwards in ever new stylistic variations. The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, born in 1866, is considered the founder of abstract art. Other important artists of abstract art are K.S. Malewitsch, Piet Mondrian, and others.
The field of graphic arts, that includes artistic representations, which are reproduced by various printing techniques.
Printmaking techniques include woodcuts, copperplate engraving, etching, lithography, serigraphy.