(born in Lollar, Hessen 1931)
Wing relief, 1989, signed, dated Mack 89, on the reverse again signed, dated, inscribed and with directional arrow, relief of aluminum grid, board and mirror, 81.5 x 101.5 cm, framed

Certificate:
Atelier Mack, Mönchengladbach, signed by the artist

Provenance:
Private Collection, Rhineland Palatinate
Private Collection, North Rhine-Westphalia - acquired from the above in 2006
Private Collection, Venice
Ketterer Kunst, Munich, 5 December 2006, lot 335

Literature:
Exhibition catalogue Galerie Ludorff, Düsseldorf 2020, p. 88

The Zero artist Heinz Mack discovered the effect of light on a piece of aluminium foil by accident. When he stepped on a piece of the foil lying on the floor, he created a carpet of light, a light reflector with the embossed pattern of his sisal carpet. This showed him how the light from the aluminium foil refracts and at the same time reflects the embossed pattern of the carpet. From then on, the effect of light in his works played a decisive role for Heinz Mack in the conception of his art. The character of the reliefs is that they capture the light and at the same time return it to the room.

The work offered here is from the series of so-called ‘wing reliefs’ (Flügelreliefs). Here Mack - unlike in his painting - does not experiment with colour, but with material and form, with the reflection and location of the viewer in the work. Mack uses a fine-meshed flexible expanded metal aluminium fabric for his wing reliefs, originally created for the aerospace industry. Its technical materiality allow the metal mesh to be given soft contours and to form varied patterns from the individual honeycombs. The artistic intention of making light, structure and movement visible is accentuated in a special way in the wing reliefs by the fine structure of the honeycomb fabric.

The structure of the relief allows the viewer to experience the refraction of light from different angles anew each time. The light refracts in the depths of the honeycombs and captivates the viewer.