Pace Prints is pleased to announce an exhibition of prints by Robert Mangold, on view from February 14–March 15, 2025, at 536 West 22nd Street. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, February 13 from 6-8pm.
A major figure of Minimalism since the 1960s, Mangold has approached printmaking as an integral part of his artmaking practice.
Robert Mangold compiles a breadth of the artist’s printed works from 1993-2017 and highlights the artist’s engagement with printmaking as a dynamic venue to explore the fundamental elements of composition: color, shape, and line.
Extending his work beyond the studio and into the workshop, Mangold has often remarked that the collaborative nature of the printmaking process allows for a unique opportunity to exercise and realize visual ideas—which begin as drawings and develop into prints and paintings sometimes simultaneously.
Of the themes showcased in this exhibition, the insertion of a curved or counterpointed line within a rectilinear shape or circular frame repeats across many of the prints.
“I realized that the grid gave a structure to these curved lines and reassured the viewer as to what they were seeing because it gives them a framework.” - Robert Mangold
Etchings like Double Column A, B, & C or Untitled (Ring Image A, B, & C) exemplify this maneuver, which leaves the space created within and around each geometric configuration on the cusp between one shape and another. These seemingly incomplete designs allow the viewer to imagine the forms extending beyond themselves, creating the sense of a potentially infinite or expanding form.
References to Architecture are also present. The large-scale aquatint etchings, Tall Column A and Tall Column B, showcase Mangold’s work at its most mathematical and structural, recalling the aesthetics of a blueprint or floor plan, while also looking up to the great columns of antiquity and Gothic Cathedrals.
Robert Mangold’s prints have been cataloged in a limited-edition print catalogue raisonné surveying work between 1968 and 1998 and in an online catalogue raisonné that can be found at robertmangoldprints.com.
